Silent Hill: Family
by E.P.O
Summary: Now complete! Matt Hardt is a seemingly ordinary man who is sleeping on board an airplane when he enters the realm of Silent Hill. Read and review, please!
1. Accident

Silent Hill: Family

Chapter 1: Accident

The trip from Los Angeles to South Ashfield was long. Very long. Matt Hardt, a 41 years old Caucasian veterinarian with brown hair, regretted that he hadn't brought any books he could read during the journey. He sighed and stared out of one of the windows of the airplane.

His parents and a few other relatives of his were living in South Ashfield. He hadn't seen them for several years now and couldn't wait to meet them again. "_They'll probably want to hear all about my life in __L.A_.," he thought, smiling.

He turned his gaze away from the window and began staring at the female stewardesses in the plane. Their blue uniforms matched the carpet they were walking on and didn't leave much to the imagination. He could see the smooth, white skin on their arms as they sold snacks and refreshments to the many passengers.

And while he thought about how beautiful the arms of the stewardesses were, he fell asleep.

Matt rarely dreamt while sleeping, and when he did dream, the dreams were  extremely boring (the most boring one he had ever experienced was simply about him standing in the kitchen of his apartment, drinking a glass of milk). It was as if his subconscious was saying "Sorry, pal, but you don't have any inner demons or stuff like that".

But what he dreamt that day, on board that plane, wasn't boring at all. 

He was walking, surrounded by fog. He looked down and saw a brown path. Dirt. Grass. Mud. He looked to his right and saw a forest. Trees. Bushes. No animals, not even a tiny mosquito. He looked to his left and saw more trees. He could also spot a big lake, far away from where he was right now. Where was he right now, anyway?

Suddenly he was back in the plane, and it seemed it was about to crash. He looked out of the window and watched in horror as it fell towards … a town? Matt could see buildings, roads, a lake …

… and then he was back in the forest, following the path. He heard strange sounds coming from all around him. "_Animals?__ No, not animals. This is something else,_" he thought and began to walk faster. 

As the plane whizzed down towards the lake, he observed that it was snowing outside. "_Snow?__ In the beginning of June? What the hell_ … _This must be a dream._" The other passengers made a cacophony of screams and prayers, but Matt was the only one who wasn't going nuts or preparing himself to meet God. His calm mind was undisturbed by the situation. He knew it was all just his imagination, just a bad dream.

Back in the forest, he reached a sign that said "Welcome to Silent Hill, the most peaceful town in the world!". After reading that, he proceeded and soon entered a small town, which resembled the one he had seen from his seat in the plane. The eerie sounds of the forest had stopped. It was quiet. Too quiet. 

"_I guess whoever made that sign wasn't being pompous when he wrote that it was so peaceful here_," he mused. 

 Another weird thing about this place was the fog. It was everywhere - a huge, white wall of mist. 

Then, everything became black and the dream ended. Matt was sitting in the plane again, his eyes closed, his body relaxed and with a little smile on his face. It had all just been a dream. A weird one.

But then the smile disappeared as he realized that none of the other passengers were talking and not a single stewardess was footing it around in the plane. Or maybe he had just suddenly become deaf? Whatever the explanation was, he couldn't hear the slightest sound.

Matt slowly opened his eyes and gasped. 

The plane had crashed after all. All the other people who had been onboard appeared to be dead. Red gore covered parts of the walls. Cold water had made its way inside, only a couple of centimetres high in Matt's side of the plane, but drenching the dead bodies in the other side of the plane because of the odd position the wreck was lying in. Maybe it had landed in a pond. 

The disgusting smell of death reached Matt's nose and his face became very pale. "Oh my God!" he managed to yell before he fell from his seat, landing on the floor, and vomited.

After that, he slowly stood and started to walk gingerly around in the plane, trying to feel the (unfortunately non-existent) pulses of the other passengers to find out whether there were any other survivors.

There weren't any.

"Oh my God," he whispered. 

Then he heard a noise coming from the cockpit.

Of course! The cockpit! He hadn't checked that out yet – maybe the pilots had somehow survived this horrible accident.

He ran into the cockpit only to discover that there was no one there. The black computer screens had been stained with blood. "Well, that's strange," he said to himself. In fact, this whole situation was strange. Why had the plane crashed in the first place, why was he – apparently – the only survivor and what was that weird noise he could hear? It sounded like the white noise made by a broken TV or a radio …

Then he noticed it. A very small, scarlet, portable radio, on one of the chairs of the cockpit. "_So that's what's been making this noise," _he thought and picked it up from the red chair where it had been camouflaged. 

As Matt carefully examined the radio, the annoying white noise seemed to get louder and louder, until he heard a muffled groan and several splashing sounds behind him, as if something was sprinting through the plane towards him.

He quickly turned around to see what it was. 

---


	2. The Beginning of the Journey

Chapter 2: The Beginning of the Journey

Matt's eyes darted around until they found the thing that was rapidly approaching him.

It looked like the mutilated body of a stewardess, still wearing that blue uniform, which was now dirty and stained with blood. Apparently someone or something had severed its legs at the knees, thus forcing it to use its arms to pull its body around now that its feet were gone. Even though it was kind of handicapped, the Stewardess moved with surprising speed as it rushed through the water. There were several ugly wounds and scars on its body, but the arms were completely uninjured.

The strangest thing about this creature was its third arm, which stuck out of its neck where its head should have been. This arm was more pale than the others and seemed to be trembling with excitement in a nauseating way as it came closer to Matt.

It wasn't human, but it wasn't merely an animal, either. "_Maybe I'm going insane and this is some sick delusion of mine. Or maybe I'm just still dreaming,_" Matt thought and slipped the radio into his trouser pocket. "_Yes, I must be dreaming. There are no such things as monst…_"

Groaning, the Stewardess jumped up and hugged him, wrapping its two normal arms around his waist. The third hand reached up and was soon clutching his throat.

Then Matt realized that he wasn't dreaming and this wasn't just some sick delusion of his. Baffled and overwhelmed with fear, he understood that the monster was trying to kill him. 

He couldn't breathe. The static emitted by his radio was deafening. As the creature slowly strangled him, he staggered around in the plane and struggled to free his body from its vice-like grip.

After about 30 seconds of trying to throttle the life out of Matt with its third hand, the Stewardess fell to the floor. Maybe it was because Matt had actually managed to fight back rather vigorously, or maybe the monster just didn't want to kill him - yet.

The terrified veterinarian scanned the plane, trying to find some kind of weapon, something he could defend himself with …

He didn't see anything useful.

The Stewardess made yet another groan-like sound ("_How can that thing groan when it doesn't have a mouth?_") and its two normal arms started dragging its body towards him again, while its third arm twitched and squirmed, obviously eager to torture its panicky victim again.

Then Matt spotted the suitcase lying on one of the passenger seats. 

It looked like an ordinary suitcase, but a round red symbol, about one foot in diameter, had been painted on it – a triangle inside two circles, surrounded by many minor symbols. 

Somehow, the intricate triangle-inside-a-circle symbol convinced Matt that there was something useful inside that suitcase. He dashed through the plane and opened it.

There was a shotgun inside.

"_Well, that's a godsend,_" he thought, grabbed the weapon, turned around, aimed and pulled the trigger.

Matt had rarely fired a shotgun before in his life. Luckily, he hit his target and the grotesque creature flew an inch backwards before it landed on the floor. He ran up to it and tried shooting it again while it was squirming on the ground, before it scrambled to its … hands, but he had run out of ammunition.

Cursing, he used the shotgun as a club and finished the Stewardess off with it. Its 15 fingers twitched slightly and then stopped moving. Blood coloured the water around the body red.    

It was dead.

Matt stood there for a couple of minutes, ruminating. The radio was now silent again. He had so many questions flying around in his brain. 

One of those questions was "_What is that thing I've just killed?_" Another question was "_Since when were passengers allowed to take shotguns on board planes?_" And another question was "_What do I do now?_" 

Confused and scared, Matt decided that there was no reason to stay on the plane any longer. He retrieved his backpack from the small hand baggage compartment above his seat and placed the radio inside it. In addition to the portable radio, the grey backpack contained his discman (which had run out of batteries 15 minutes after the plane had taken off), toothbrush, some CD's (old jazz and blues songs), sunglasses, aspirins and his cell phone which appeared to be broken or something – he couldn't call 911 or his relatives in South Ashfield to tell them what had happened. Clutching the shotgun and with the backpack hanging from his shoulders, he exited through the doorway in the left side of the wreck.

After a split second of falling, his body plunged into the waters of Toluca Lake. He quickly stood – the water was waist-high – and got out of the cold lake, shivering. His clothes - a black t-shirt and brown trousers - were soaked and his teeth chattered. 

Matt turned around and stared at the plane. It was badly damaged and had landed at the shore of the large, gloomy lake he had seen in his dream. A few windows had been smashed. One of the wings was broken – it had probably hit a tree or building before the plane landed in the lake. 

He turned around and scanned the area he was about to wander through. It was a forest slope, filled with various trees. He could see a track in the distance. Could it be the path from his dream? Intent on finding out, he footed it through the forest.

After about a minute of wandering up the hillside, he heard an unearthly noise coming from behind him – it sounded like at least 50 men, women and children whispering, crying and laughing … He turned around.

The plane had vanished.

Matt shuddered and began making his way towards the track again, now walking much faster than before the plane had been pulled into the murky depths of Toluca Lake. 

He reached the path – it _was_ the same as the one from his dream – and followed it through the quiet forest (none of the disturbing sounds from his dream could be heard). Soon white fog surrounded him. "Great," he mumbled and continued following the path. 

He reached the white van about half a minute after the fog had appeared. There was a map of Silent Hill and a small flashlight on top of it. He snatched them and placed them in his trouser pockets, then continued following the track which had now turned into a wide road.

While Matt footed it towards the town of Silent Hill, he passed several signs ("DANGER! KEEP OUT! CONSTRUCTION AREA!" "NO TRESPASSING") and old newspapers that had been scattered across the road. He began to hear eerie faint sounds. According to the map, he was currently following "Wiltse Road". "What a strange name for a road," he mumbled as he passed the sign from his dream ("Welcome to Silent Hill, the most peaceful town in the world!"). Some shotgun shells had been dropped in front of the sign. He picked them up and reloaded his weapon with them, fumbling ackwardly for a minute before he remembered the correct way to reload a shotgun.

After reloading the gun, Matt continued following Wiltse Rd. Suddenly, something white and cold landed on his T-shirt. He looked down at it.

A snowflake.

And then, hundreds of snowflakes fell from the sky. "Am I still dreaming or has the weather really gone crazy?" Matt said to himself (it was June) and looked up at the idle descent of the snowflakes.  

Later on, Matt entered the old resort town itself and stopped walking to study the map. He was standing on a short street called Sanders St. and there was a flower shop across the road. "_There has to be at least one phone I can use in there_," he thought and entered the shop. 

The flower shop was dark and decrepit. Some of the windows had been smashed and the flowers were withering. Although it was 14:00 P.M. according to Matt's watch, there were no customers or clerks in the store.

Matt was starting to think that he was alone in the town. Maybe the residents had abandoned it for some reason, or maybe they had all been wiped out by some terrifying force, like in that Dean Koontz novel he had read a couple of years ago – "Phantoms"…

There was a black phone on the counter. Matt tried to make a call, but was disappointed when he discovered that the phone didn't work. He put down the receiver.

A door behind the counter was ajar. He swiftly made his way into the room on the other side of the door. It was a surprisingly large room with ordinary furniture – chairs, a table, lamps, a TV, a fridge, a bed. The owner(s) of the shop had probably been living here. The place was full of flowers that looked like they hadn't been watered for a long, long time. A door in the wall opposite the door Matt had entered through was half-open. He deduced that there was a bathroom beyond it. 

The TV was the same as the one in Matt's flat in L.A. He tried turning it on, but the machine was intent on only showing him snow, snow and more snow, so he murmured "dammit" and turned it off.

He was about to leave when he heard someone breathing heavily. The sound came from the bathroom of the home and was unusually loud, as if the person was using a microphone. He could also hear the faint sound of … falling water?

"Er … hello?" he said. "Is there someone out there? In the bathroom? … Hello?"

Matt walked through the home and stepped into the bathroom. There was a toilet to his right, a washbasin and a mirror in front of him and a shower to his left. The sounds were coming from his left. A white curtain prevented him from seeing who or what was in the shower.   

"Someone taking a shower in there? … Hello?"

The curtain was moving slightly back and forth. "_But there's no draught in this place,_" Matt thought and approached the curtain.

"Hello?" he repeated, still not getting an answer. He could still hear the sounds of someone breathing heavily and what he assumed was falling water. 

Afraid and curious at the same time, he pulled the curtain aside.

The dead body of a lean woman with blonde hair had been nailed on to the wall opposite the curtain. Her clothes had been spattered with blood and huge rusty nails had penetrated the eyes and wrists to keep the corpse hanging one foot above the floor. Instead of water, a red liquid – probably blood – was coming out of the shower. 

There was something familiar about the dead person. Matt knew he had seen her before, but he couldn't recollect where and when. He couldn't even remember her name …

Then he felt the small cold hands of a 7-9 years old child touch his back as he was suddenly pushed into the shower. Blood drenched his clothes and he heard a little boy giggle behind him. He was about to turn around to take a look at the annoying kid who had pushed him, when someone turned off the light and slammed the door shut … 

Darkness. 

He couldn't see anything. He heard blood-curdling sounds coming from all around him. Moaning, screeching, whining … The sounds made by the evil creatures that had been lurking under his bed at night when he was a child and his imagination was soaring. For a moment, in that bathroom, Matt Hardt _was_ a child again, his imagination soared again and he was convinced that those creatures had returned to once more frighten him to death …

Then he got the flashlight out of his pocket and turned it on. 

He was alone in the bathroom. A mature, 41 years old man, alone in a bathroom. Ordinary, hot water was now coming out of the spray and there wasn't any blood on his clothes, just water. There wasn't a single dead body nailed on to the wall, either. "_What? But … the blood … and that corpse … that wasn't just a hallucination, was it?_" he thought, frowning. 

After switching the light on, he turned off the flashlight, slipped it into his pocket and examined a message that someone had apparently written with a black ball pen on the mirror while the light had been turned off. A lot of the words were misspelled. Matt almost couldn't see his reflection because of all the small, black letters covering the mirror:

**I must forget his silly theorry, that hotheaded fool, She IS immortall, the moourning IS over and She IS otherwurldly, and I must resist the temptaytion, I must hymmn and yearhn for Her, so that She will save me when She arrives, but not everyone can be saved, yes, the spirit is willing but the flesch is weak, you fill your mind with lyies, you are a yukkhy sinner, your toomb is ready and your etternal soul will never rest again but now your journey has begun and you must go to BAR NEELY'S **

"Bar Neely's?" Matt muttered and studied the map. There was a bar called Neely's Bar at the corner of Sanders St. and Neely St. "Well, I guess I could do with a drink at the moment," he said and decided to find that bar, hoping that it wouldn't be as desolate as the flower shop.

After taking a leak, he left the bathroom, walked through the abode of the flower shop owner(s) and made his way out of the shop. 

Back on the mist-shrouded Sanders St., Matt was greeted by two monsters that looked just like the thing he had defeated in the plane. Luckily he had his trusty and loaded shotgun. After two shots, the Stewardesses were lying on the sidewalk, squirming. He ran up to them and kicked them until they looked dead. Then he stood there, exhausted, and took breath while snowflakes landed on his shivering body. "_What the fuck ARE these things?" _Matt mused. "_This isn't just a bad dream …_" He began footing it to Neely's Bar.

He had only taken three steps down Sanders St. when he heard a somewhat hoarse male voice coming from somewhere behind him.

"Hmm, they're new. Are these yours?"

---


	3. Stu Matheson

Chapter 3: Stu Matheson

Matt turned around with a bewildered face. "What?"

The man who had asked him the odd question looked weary and worn out. Caucasian. Probably about the same age as Matt. Dishevelled, blonde hair. His worn trousers, tie and shoes were black, but his crumpled shirt was white, except for a few red stains (blood?). Standing at the two dead Stewardesses, he was partially concealed by the thick white fog. "Are these yours?" the man repeated.

"What do you mean?" Matt asked, approaching the man.

"These monsters – they're yours, aren't they? I've never seen _them_ before," he said.

"No, they're not "mine". What do you mean, anyway?" Matt said.

The man with the tie glared at Matt for a while. Then he began muttering: "Of course … You must be new in town. You have no idea what's going on, do you?"

Matt shook his head. "No," he answered, suddenly remembering all the questions that had showed up in his brain and had been flying around in there ever since the plane crash. "Do you?"

The man with the tie nodded.

"Okay. Then why is it snowing in June, why is this town so … why does this town seem so deserted and what the hell are these … these monsters? And who are you?"

"I'm Stu Matheson," the man replied calmly. "I was an anthropology teacher in Boston until six months ago."

"Well, what happened six months ago?"

"I came here. To this town. Since then, I've been trapped here …"

"Trapped?"

"Yes, trapped. I can't get out. All the roads leading out of the town are blocked somehow."

"That's not true," Matt replied and pulled the map out from his pocket, showing Stu the path leading from Sanders St. to "Observation Deck". "You could just follow Wiltse Rd. and go through the forest here, for instance, and …"

"Nope. I've already tried that," Stu said and produced an old-looking map of his own. Matt observed that Stu had drawn crosses across some parts of the streets with a red marker. "You see those crosses? That's where the road's caved in or blocked," Stu said.

Matt studied the positions of the red crosses and then deduced: "But if that's true, then we're trapped in the town! … Hey, wait a minute. You've also drawn a red cross where Sanders St. meets Wiltse Road."

"Yeah. The road's been obliterated there, ever since I arrived half a year ago," Stu explained.

"That can't be true. I just walked over that cross when I entered this town from Wiltse Road," Matt said and placed his map in his pocket again. Then he wandered through the mist, back to where Sanders Street should meet Wiltse Road, intent on showing Stu that there wasn't the slightest gap in the road there, that they weren't trapped, that they could easily leave Silent Hill if they wanted to …

He stopped walking abruptly when he saw that Stu was actually right. The road had collapsed. It had been replaced by a huge, misty pit – as if a minor comet had fallen down right there while Matt had been checking out the flower shop and chatting with Stu.

The latter soon catched up with Matt. The two men stared into the abyss for a while. Then Matt broke the silence.

"What the fuck? That's … impossible …"

"Yeah," Stu mumbled. "When you end up in Silent Hill, you'd better get used to impossible things."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, this town isn't just an ordinary resort town – not anymore. It's … how shall I put it … Hell on earth. People who are lost in the dark forest of sin are brought here to … to atone and be punished for what they have done."

"Huh? The dark forest of sin?" Matt said, dumbfounded.

"You haven't read Dante Aghlieri's Divine Comedy, have you?"

"Er … no," Matt replied, somewhat ashamed of the fact that he didn't know much about classical literature, "but … what are you trying to tell me?"

"This town is a place where anything can happen, because _the old Gods are here_," Stu said, "Metraton, Xuchilphaba and Xuchilbara, Lobsel Vith, Phaleg, Ophiel and the Creator of Paradise herself, God. They pass the time tormenting sinners like us, until the day of reckoning, the Time of the Awakening …"

"Well, that's just great," Matt mumbled. "That's just SO FUCKING GREAT! I'm standing in a ghost town, I've just killed some creatures that look like something from a painting by Dali, it's snowing in June and I'm talking to this CRAZY FUCKER WITH A TWISTED RELIGION!" he shouted and walked away.

Stu quickly catched up with him and followed him down Sanders St. as they passed Gonzale's Mexican Restaurant. "Where are you going?" he asked.

"To Neely's Bar. I need a beer," Matt replied.

"You can't get a beer there. The place is utterly deserted and decrepit."

"I'd rather check it out myself before I believe you," Matt said and continued walking, although he wouldn't be surprised if Neely's Bar really was as desolate as the flower shop had been. 

When they reached the bar, Matt tried two of the three doors of the building, but they wouldn't open. It looked like the locks were broken. The third entrance to the bar was a brown door in the wall between a broken pay station and the "Baby & Kids Super Store". Luckily, this one could easily be opened. As Matt was about to enter the bar, he looked back at Stu.

"I'm not coming with you. Not into Bar Neely's," Stu declared.

"But why?" Matt asked, slightly annoyed.

"Because … that bar … it tells you things. Messages, written on the walls. It gives me the creeps," he explained, "I'll wait here."

"Okay," Matt mumbled, "if you're really so afraid of this place, then fine … By the way, have you seen a little kid around here? A boy?"

"Nope. What does this kid look like?" Stu asked, vaguely interested.

"I don't know. I was in this bathroom in the flower shop, when … Never mind. It's a long story," Matt said and entered the bar, closing the door behind him.

The room he had just entered was dark, deserted and vacuous. Windows covered with old newspapers. Wires hanging from the ceiling. A fluorescent tube was apparently supposed to illuminate the bar, but it was broken. The most interesting thing about the room was the message written in blood on one of the walls:

**you**** don't have any relatives living in South **

**Ashfield, do you? that is just one of the LIES you **

**have**** filled your foolish head with to replace the unpleasant TRUTH**

Matt thought about this for a while and recalled that … it was actually true. He didn't have any relatives there, in South Ashfield. His parents were living in the small provincial town of Derry, his grandparents had died several years ago, he had never had any aunts, uncles or brothers, his sister had recently moved to New York … He didn't have any relatives living in South Ashfield. 

"_But then why did you want to go there in the first place, Matt? Why was it so important for you to catch that plane back in the airport in __L.A.__? Why were you convinced that you had some family to visit in __South Ashfield__, when there's not a single relative of yours there?_" a voice whispered in his head.

Questions, questions. Flying around in his brain, like butterflies in a cage …

Then he noticed a memo on the counter. He gingerly picked it up and examined it. Someone had written a sort of poem on it with a black pencil:

**A place of knowledge,**

**Entertainment,**

**Education,**

**Escape from reality**

**A place with something for everyone, young and old.******

**That is what they tell thou.**

**But don't they know? It is futile to struggle against the cold.**

**And the hand of death, too.******

**Now THAT is something for everyone,**

**Both young and old,**

**The roaring beast,**

**The end of their pointless fight**

**Thy journey is indeed not over – far from it.**

**Yes, but how will it end?**

**I do not know, and I don't wish to know. That place –**

**Yes, thy destination.**

"I wonder who wrote this? Some nutty Shakespeare wannabe?" Matt muttered, placed the memo in his backpack and left the bar.

Stu had disappeared. Gone. Vanished without a trace.

Well, _almost_ without a trace.

A blanket of snow was now covering the streets of the town, and Stu's footprints were totally visible. Before he went into Neely's Bar, Matt had forgotten to ask the man whether he had a cell phone he could use, so the shivering veterinarian followed the footprints through the town, intent on finding mr. Matheson, who would hopefully turn out to have a phone on him which wasn't broken.

Matt's teeth chattered. He wasn't dressed for a weather like this. He felt like he was going to die if he stayed on the streets for just one more minute. "_And then penguins will show up to feed off my dead body_," he thought and laughed hysterically.

As he followed the footprints up Neely Street, past the "Grand Market" and down the narrow Harris Street, Stewardesses would suddenly jump down from the trees and poles where they had been climbing around like spiders when Matt walked by. Luckily, the crackling noise of the radio warned Matt before these assaults occurred. Instead of wasting bullets, Matt merely ran past the creatures, easily avoiding their attacks.

At the middle of Harris St., Stu's footprints led Matt away from the road and across a parking lot, towards a large building with dark windows. One of the cars parked there was a scratched Pontiac with smashed windows. An ordinary small axe was stuck on it, the blade buried in the hood, as if an insane lumberjack who really hated Pontiacs had recently visited this particular parking lot.

Thinking that the axe would come in handy against those weird monsters, Matt (who was no Arnold Schwarzenegger) spent 30 frustrating seconds pulling hard and cursing, until the axe finally came free and he clumsily fell backwards, landing in the snow. He scrambled to his feet, stuffed the axe into his backpack and then continued following the footprints that went into the large building.

A sign above the entrance said "**CARPENTER LIBRARY – **_books, music, movies, videogames_". The glass doors below the sign automatically slid aside as Matt approached them. He smiled. It was good to know that at least one piece of machinery was working in this town.

"A place of knowledge, entertainment, education, escape from reality," Matt muttered as he entered the warm library.


	4. Insane

A/N: Lol, I guess Stu's already gone kinda nuts. As for the fresh meals … remember Eddie at Pete's Bowl-a-rama. 'Nuff said. Anyway, I used to write that the plane was flying from L.A. to South Ashford. Well, that was supposed to be a SH4 reference. Unfortunately, I just found out that Henry Townsend lives in a city called South Ash_field_… *smacks hand to forehead* So I've fixed that in the last three chapters and from now on, I'll hopefully remember to write Ashfield instead of Ashford … Oh, and this chapter might remind you - a LOT - of a certain cutscene from SH2. Sorry. Konami ought to sue me. –E.P.O.

---

Chapter 4: Insane

Matt heard a muffled sound as the glass doors slid back behind him to once more keep the cold and snow out of the library and looked at his surroundings. The place was brightly lit by round lamps, each of them about two feet in diameter, hanging from the ceiling. It was a two-storey building and a big, wide staircase in front of him went up to the second floor. There was also an elevator to his right. 

A piece of paper was attached to a bulletin board next to the elevator. Matt walked up to it and studied it. In the upper right corner, the words "Carpenter Public Library" told Matt that it was a map of this place. Apparently, the first floor was for art exhibitions and other cultural arrangements. There was also toilets and a cafeteria here. The second floor was where you could take out books, music and other stuff. The west side was the department with books, magazines and videogames for kids. The east side was the department for adults, with books, movies, music, magazines and newspapers. Between these two departments was the counter area where you'd go to take out or return stuff to the librarians. 

Thinking that he might find a phone on the second floor, Matt decided to use the elevator to get there, but nothing happened when he pushed the button. He then footed it up the stairs. Two big black doors with glass windows in them formed an entrance to the library area up here, but they were locked.

"Dammit. Dammit, dammit, dammit."

Looking through the glass windows, he could see several phones on the desks and counters in there. After trying to open the doors again and muttering "dammit" a fifth time, he made his way down the stairs to explore the first floor.

When he reached the bottom of the stairway, a Stewardess jumped out from behind a withering potted plant, startling him. After missing two times, he finally managed to shoot the abomination. He ran up to it and stepped on it, making a face as he heard the sickening "crunch" sound of his foot hitting the monster. 

After killing the Stewardess, he examined his shotgun. There was only one shot left now. "Oh crap."

There were two major halls for exhibitions and stuff on the first floor. The first hall Matt walked into contained an exhibition of paintings that had been made by the residents of Silent Hill about 18 years ago. Large square pillars supported the ceiling. There were a lot of windows to his right, but the blinds made the light seep into the hall in tiny streaks. More of those round modern lamps hung from the ceiling in here.

A woman – probably 18-21 years young – with red hair and brown eyes stood in the middle of the hall, contemplating one of the paintings. She wore a black sweater and blue jeans. Illuminated by the streaks of light, she looked beautiful, almost angelic.

"Uh … hi," Matt said.

The angel turned around to look at him. "Hi. Er … who are you?"

"Matt Hardt."

"Daryl Thurman."

For ten strange seconds, they just stood there, not knowing what they should or shouldn't say now. Then, Matt broke the silence: "Do you know what's happening around here?"

"No. It's weird – this place is like a ghost town. And all the buildings are falling apart, too," Daryl said.

"I know. It reminds me of that novel, "Phantoms"."

"Yeah, that was a cool book. I think the ending was crappy, though. Did you see the movie?"

"No."

"Good for you. It sucks," she declared and turned around to stare at the painting again.

Matt thought that it was weird, talking about something as indifferent as a horror novel and its screen version, when they were trapped in this hellish town where all the inhabitants seemed to have vanished somehow and monsters roamed the streets. However, he enjoyed pretending there was nothing creepy going on and decided to continue their trivial conversation.

"So … what's that painting?"

"The title's "Toluca Sunset". It says that dr. Michael Kaufmann, the director of Alchemilla Hospital, painted it in his spare time 18 years ago."

"Really?" Matt said and walked closer to the painting so he could get a better look at it. 

It depicted that large lake the plane had landed in. A few people sat at the shore, fishing. The season was obviously autumn. Because it was sunset, the water had an eerie crimson colour. 

"Looks like a blood swamp, doesn't it?" Daryl said. "Still, I think it's pretty beautiful …"

"You wouldn't happen to have a phone on you, would you?" Matt asked.

"I've got a Nokia, but something's been wrong with it ever since I got into the town," Daryl replied, "I can't make any calls or anything …"

"_Great,_" Matt thought, "_my relatives in __South Ashfield__ must be wondering where I have got to … oh wait, I don't have any relatives in __South Ashfield__. Why do I …_"

"Hey, what's with the gun?"

Apparently, Daryl had just noticed the shotgun Matt was holding. "Oh, that. I found that in a suitcase an hour ago. Since then, I've been carrying it around with me. It … uh … comes in handy, when I need to defend myself against those … you know … those weird monsters."

"Monsters?" Daryl exclaimed.

"You know … those things, humans with three arms …"

Daryl eyed Matt with suspicion. "If that's a joke, it's not funny," she replied.

Matt suddenly remembered the Stewardess lying in the entrance hall at the bottom of the wide staircase. "Follow me," he said and led her into the hall where he had killed the monster.

But when they got here, the creature was gone. Even the pool of blood had disappeared.

"What was it that you wanted to show me?" Daryl asked.

"Er … nothing. Forget it," he said.

Silence.

Then, Daryl said: "Wanna go check out the cafeteria?"

"Sure."

The library's cafeteria was surprisingly large, with big windows, withering pot plants, lots of chairs and fashionable white tables. Just a typical modern cafeteria. Daryl and Matt entered through a wooden door and walked into the room while discussing which movie based on a good book was the worst piece of crap ever.

"Well, I think that the movie based on "Sphere" was the worst piece of crap I have ever seen, even though Dustin Hoffman was in it," Daryl said.

"Yes, but the book was terrible, too. Michael Chrichton is …" Matt trailed off. He had heard a familiar sound behind him.

He turned around to discover a Stewardess sitting on a table, watching him like a hungry lion watching a zebra. The monster groaned again and its two normal arms began dragging its body across the table, towards its prey.

Matt took good aim and fired the shotgun. Daryl screamed and covered her ears with her hands. Matt tried shooting the Stewardess again while it was lying on the table, but he had run out of ammunition. He dropped the gun, reached into his backpack, produced the axe and ran to the table to finish off the monster.

"Matt, what the hell do you think you're doing?!" Daryl screamed. 

"What does it look like? I'm trying to save us from this damn thing," the man shouted and raised the axe above his head.

"You're trying to save us from a table?!" Daryl yelled as the blade of the axe plunged into the white table top.

"Can't you see it?! The monster? It's _right there_," Matt said and raised the axe again.

_"What I **see** is an old mentally ill guy fighting one of his delusions_,_" _Daryl thought. "_Or maybe he's on drugs. Oh my God, what if he starts to think that **I'm** one of his "monsters" … And he's got an axe. Who knows how dangerous this guy could be?_" She suddenly felt very uneasy.

The shotgun was still there, on the floor. She swiftly grabbed it and ran out of the cafeteria, slamming the door shut behind her.

Matt brought down the axe for the second time. The Stewardess stopped moving, clearly dead now. He felt relieved for a moment … Then he noticed that Daryl had run off and taken the shotgun with her.

Outside the cafeteria, Daryl used the gun as a bolt, sliding it through the small handle of the wooden door, thus making the door almost impossible to open from inside the room. "Whew!" she said under her breath. That madman was trapped in the cafeteria now. She was safe. 

A round window in the door allowed her to see some of the room on the other side. She could see Matt taking breath after those two strokes with the axe. He ran his eyes over the cafeteria, looking surprised. Then he dashed to the door and tried opening it.

"Daryl? What are …"

"Calm down, Matt," she said in her most authoritative tone of voice, "just stay there and I'll go find a phone that works. I'll call a nice, peaceful hospital and ask them to get here as soon as possi …"

"A mental hospital?" Matt said.

"Yes. A nice one, where you can …"

"I'm not insane, Daryl. Open the … oh no." Through the window, Daryl could see that Matt was cocking his eye at something behind him. 

"What wrong?"

"Daryl, I really think you should open the door now. There's … something in here." The anger in Matt's voice had abruptly been replaced by fear.

"What?" Daryl said.

"Oh my God … this one's different than the others. It's bigger. It's got ... claws …" Matt sounded very scared and disgusted now. "Don't leave me here, please, Daryl …"

"Calm down. It's all just your imagination, Matt. You're probably suffering from a mental illness known as schi…"

"This is NOT my imagination!" The anger had returned to Matt's voice. He began pounding on the door. Daryl stepped back, startled. "Open the fucking door!"

She really needed to find a phone right now. Ignoring Matt's angry calls, she hurried away.

---

Through the window, Matt could see Daryl walk away. "Bitch," he mumbled. Why had she been unable to see or at least hear the Stewardess? "_Maybe Daryl's right. Maybe you **are** just seeing shit,_" a little voice said in his head, "_maybe you **do** belong in a lunatic asylum …_" 

Behind Matt, the reason why he wanted Daryl to remove the makeshift bolt was lumbering towards him. This grotesque monster was much larger than a Stewardess and resembled a dog more than a human being, although it didn't have a tail or fur. It's skin was yellowish, leathery and furrowed. Its body looked like that of a deformed person. Instead of arms, it had two extra legs growing out of its shoulders. It was the way it crawled forward that made it resemble a dog. Oddly enough, the skin on its four shins was brown. Long, razor-sharp claws grew out of its 20 toes.

The freak of nature had three bald human heads, connected to the body by three ridiculously long necks. Their faces were horribly distorted. They didn't have any noses, just huge toothless mouths and long, dark, horizontal cracks where their eyes should have been. The head in the middle was bloodred, while the other two were as white as sheets. Disgusting red veins were stretched out between their rudimentary faces, preventing the heads from getting more than three inches away from each other. 

And they were clearly trying to get away from each other. 

The two outer heads sounded like they were squealing in pain as they twitched and jerked, repeatedly attempting to defy the veins and get away from the head in the middle, which howled and roared as the body it was attached to moved closer to Matt.

Remembering the myths about the Greco-Roman hellhound he had read when he was a kid, Matt now aptly named this monster Cerberus.

Intent on not getting into a fight with the Cerberus, he used his axe to smash the window in the door and reached out with his right arm, trying to get hold of the shotgun on the other side and remove it from the handle. But before he could reach the gun, the Cerberus grabbed him with the claws on its right foreleg and tossed him away from the door.

Matt uttered a little yelp of pain as he landed on a table in a corner of the cafeteria. Before he could get up, the hellhound had leapt up on the table and its red middle face was just one inch away from his. He could hear his radio playing static, the deafening screams and roars of the creature, he could feel its warm, nauseating breath on his face …

"_Oh my God, I'm gonna die now, this freak is gonna kill me now, Oh my God …_"

The Cerberus raised its right foreleg and was about to plunge its claws into Matt's face when he rolled off the table and landed painfully on the floor. The claws pierced the table top and the dog roared angrily when it discovered that the table was now stuck on its "paw". Shaking its foreleg, the Cerberus soon managed to get rid of the table, which whistled through the air until it hit the wall and fell on the floor in a confusing heap of table legs and pieces of the table top. Then Matt got the monster's attention again.

Howling and screaming, the monstrosity lumbered towards him. Matt hurled the axe, aiming for the middle neck, hoping that this was the Cerberus's soft spot.

It turned out that his theory was correct.

When the axe plunged into the monster's neck, all three heads screamed in pain and the abomination staggered backwards. After a few seconds of fumbling, the foot of its left foreleg found the axe and pulled it out of the throat, allowing a jet of blood to emerge from the wound. Roaring angrily again, the Cerberus flung the weapon out of the nearest window, shattering the glass. Then it staggered towards Matt, intent on snuffing out his life before it died itself. 

Matt ran to the heap lying at the wall, picked up one of the spotlessly clean table legs and thrashed the Cerberus with it until the detestable creature stopped screeching and Carpenter Library was quiet once more.

---


	5. Four Tales and Two Kids

A/N: Lol, sorry about Daryl's name. I'm obsessed with Kill Bill. Must. See. Volume. 2. Soon … I'm glad none of you noticed how much that scene with Daryl and Matt resembled the scene with Laura and James at Brookhaven ("You snotty little brat, open up!"). Btw, I've named the library after John Carpenter, who directed this great Silent Hill-ish movie called "In the Mouth of Madness". Anyway, I shall stop rambling now. -E.P.O.

Chapter 5: Four Tales and Two Kids

"Shit."

Matt had searched every square foot of the parking lot outside the cafeteria several times now, but he couldn't find the axe that had been flung out through the window earlier. "_And if I stay out here any longer, I'll freeze to death and penguins will …_"

Suddenly, the radio began playing static again. It was rather quiet, so the monster(s) detected by the little machine were probably far away. Matt was only armed with the metal table leg, so he didn't want to get into another fight. He gave up his quest for the missing axe and got back into the library's cafeteria through the broken window. The white noise trailed off.

After removing Daryl's makeshift bolt, Matt opened the door, squeezed the shotgun into his backpack and exited the cafeteria. He was back in the entrance hall. 

The doors at the top of the stairway were now open. 

Smiling and clutching the table leg, Matt ran up the stairs and entered the second floor. The smile vanished from his face after he had tried four of the five phones up here and discovered that they were broken. Now there was only one phone left – a black one, seated on a large desk that was cluttered up with newspapers and brochures. He walked up to the desk and picked up the receiver. 

No dial tone.

"How surprising," he muttered, hung up and sighed. What was he supposed to do now?

Then, as he ran his eyes over the desk, he noticed two bottles and what looked like a first aid kit. He opened the white box. It was indeed a first aid kit, containing bandages, disinfectant, morphine, penicillin and adhesive plaster. Since he wasn't badly wounded at the moment, he decided to save the first aid kit for later. After cramming the kit into his backpack, he examined the two bottles. They contained a brown liquid that smelled like shit, but - as he discovered when he drank from one of the bottles - tasted like orange juice and seemed to replenish his health. He drank all the liquid and then left the empty bottles on the desk.

Matt spent the next 60 seconds wandering around in the department for adults. This library really had everything – collections of poems, fantasy, horror, whodunits, romance novels … Of course he didn't feel like reading any of it right now.

He was walking down an aisle in the department with classical literature when he saw the girl. Her age was probably 8-10 years. She had black hair and wore blue jeans, a yellow unbuttoned raincoat and a white t-shirt. She was standing in the middle of the aisle, reading a bulky book. When she heard Matt's footsteps, she closed the book and turned around to look at him.

"Hi," Matt said and stopped walking, four metres away from the kid. "What's your name?"

The girl just stood there, staring at him. "_Maybe she's mute_," Matt thought.

Then she gave him an answer: "My name's Amanda and I'm not mute."

"_What the …_"

"Er … what's that book you've got?" Matt asked, frowning.

Amanda glanced at the book she was holding in her right hand. "It's called "Faust". Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote it." She tossed it towards Matt. The book flew through the air for a few seconds, before it landed and slid across the floor until it stopped at Matt's feet. He picked it up and scanned the cover. He remembered reading this story when he was 20. It was a classical tale about a scientist named Faust, who …

"I think it's kinda difficult to understand," Amanda said.

"Well, it's not a children's book … Anyway, what are you doing here?"

"Trying to find a good book. This is a public library, right?"

"Yeah," Matt said and walked closer to the kid, "but why aren't you … hey, where are you going?"

Amanda had suddenly run off down the aisle. Matt tore along after her. "Amanda, wait!" 

While rushing away, the girl suddenly reached out, snatched a book from the shelf and pitched it back at Matt, aiming for his head. "Amanda, where are … argh!" The book collided with his shin and he fell to the ground. By the time he had scrambled to his feet, Amanda was gone. He cursed, took breath and picked up the book that had hit his shin. It was "The Tempest" by William Shakespeare.

Matt didn't know why, but he felt like he had to take the two books with him. He managed to stuff "Faust" into the backpack, but then there wasn't room for "The Tempest". After throwing the discman, CD's and sunglasses away, he placed the Shakespeare play in the backpack and continued roaming the library.

The round lamps hanging from the ceiling lit up the shelves as he strolled by. All the computers he found were broken. The second floor was completely silent except for the sound of his footsteps. He was glad there weren't any monsters around, but it was still pretty creepy, being all alone in a place like this, a place where anything could happen …

At a wall in the children's department, between the shelves filled with fairy tales and comics, Matt found something that looked like a strange silver door. There were four vertical slits arranged in one vertical row in the middle of the door. He tried pushing and pulling the door, but it wouldn't budge.

Then he noticed the scrap of paper that had been attached to the wall above the door with drawing pins. He gingerly detached the paper and studied it. Someone or something had written a cryptic poem on it.

**4 tales, 4 slits, in a door**

**In a door made of silver;**

**But where does each book belong?**

**First, above the other 3:**

**Tale about an alchemist,**

**Who meets the Devil himself.**

**Just below that magic tale:**

**A man loses everything;**

**Tale of suffering and faith.******

**Below 2 and above 1:**

**Tale that begins with a storm,**

**Ends on enchanted island.******

**In the very lowest slit: **

**A most dangerous voyage;**

**Classical Greek adventure.******

**Truth may seem, but cannot be;**

**Beauty brag, but 't is not she;**

**Truth and beauty buried be.**

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Matt murmured and frowned. Then he got an idea. What if the author of the poem was telling him which books to place in which slits? "_That would actually make this weird poem kinda useful … that is, if the door can indeed be opened when the right books are placed in the right slits_." But Matt didn't really doubt whether the door would open when he had placed the books correctly; in a place like this, a combination of books unlocking a door didn't seem very strange. "_But I've only got two books … I'm probably gonna need four._"****

Then he noticed the two books lying nearby, in the corner of a pool table. "_A pool table, here?__ … Well, this **is** the kids' department, so I guess that's not strange at all._" 

One of the books was simply called "The Book of Job". Matt picked it up and examined its back. It said "**The story about Job is one of the** **principal works of world literature. Philosophers, artists and theologians have all been inspired and affected by this magnificent piece of …" and so on.**

The other book was called "The Odyssey". Matt picked it up, not doubting whether this was really Homer's classical work or not, and carried the two books back to the silver door.

"Okay, let's see … In the very lowest slit … Classical Greek adventure – that's got to be The Odyssey," Matt said and placed that particular book in the lowest slit. "Now, in the next highest slit, "A man loses everything; Tale of suffering and faith". I guess that's Job," he muttered and placed the "Book of Job" in the second highest slit. 

Then he produced the two last books from his backpack and squeezed "The Tempest" into the next lowest slit and "Faust" into the very highest one.

The thick silver door swung back and disappeared from his range of vision, revealing a small room. Matt smiled and stepped through the doorway, into the somewhat dark area beyond it.

This room was partially illuminated by a single round, modern lamp, hanging from the middle of the ceiling. The walls were white and smooth. There were no windows or doors, except for the one Matt had opened by solving the book puzzle. There wasn't any furniture either, except for an ordinary easy chair in the middle of the room, right under the lamp.

And there, sitting in the armchair, was another child.

The boy had, like Amanda, black hair and his face also reminded Matt of the girl. Perhaps the two kids were in the same family? He wore a Bart Simpson t-shirt and black trousers.

"Were you the one who pushed me in that bathroom, back in the flower shop?" Matt asked.

"Yeah," the boy answered, "that was fun."

"_That was FUN? You think that was FUN?!_" Matt thought. He wanted to do a Homer Simpson imitation and throttle the life out of the stupid brat while yelling "Why, you little …" But instead, he merely said: "Really? You've got one fucked-up sense of humour." 

The boy chuckled.

"What's your name, anyway?" Matt asked.

"Tommy."

"Right. Er … do you know a girl named Amanda?"

"Yeah, she's my sister."

Suddenly, Matt heard the faint sound of … 

"A siren? What the … Hey, Tommy, do you know why the sirens are sounding?" Matt said.

But Tommy didn't reply. There was now something about the kid that made Matt a little uneasy.

Abruptly and with an eerie facial expression, Tommy got out of the easy chair and ran out of the room. "Oh crap. Not again," Matt mumbled and ran after the boy. As he followed Tommy through the library, the sirens got louder and louder …

Until Matt saw the woman.

She was a lean, blonde woman with green eyes and pale skin. Tommy ran up to her and, after giving her a brief hug, turned around to look at Matt. Both Tommy and the woman smiled. The woman's right hand ruffled the kid's hair and then rested on his head. 

_"Oh my God, that's the woman I saw in the flower shop, but she was dead, nailed onto the wall," _Matt thought. Although this woman looked like the one from the shower, there were small differences. The woman in the shower had been wearing blood-stained clothes, this woman wore ordinary, clean clothes. The woman in the shower had been hanging above the floor, this woman had her feet on the ground.

And while the woman in the shower had been dead, _this woman was alive and uninjured._

Suddenly, dirty brown skin seemed to grow out of Tommy's scalp. The skin gracefully slid down across the boy's body, covering his face, then his neck, then his chest … The filthy skin also crawled up the woman's right hand, relentlessly wrapping around her wrist, then her arm, then her right shoulder … The skin was actually creeping across their bodies like a twining plant growing on two statues. They just smiled, stared at Matt and stood still while their bodies were slowly being wrapped up in skin. 

"Oh my fucking God, oh my fucking God, oh my fucking God …" Matt droned as he staggered backwards.

Everything began to bleed now. The ceiling bled, the floor bled, the walls, the shelves, the books – it all bled. Stains of blood crawled around on the ceiling like spiders, streaks of blood twisted themselves on the floor like snakes. The sirens were deafening.

In the middle of this madness, he remembered the blonde woman's name …

_"Sophie …"_

… and then everything became black as Matt lost consciousness. 


	6. Otherworld Library

Chapter 6: Otherworld Library

When Matt regained consciousness, Carpenter Public Library had been transformed into a dark version of what it used to look like. 

In fact, it was so dark he couldn't see anything until he had stood, pulled the flashlight out of his pocket and switched it on.

The first thing he observed about his new surroundings was the lamps. The round modern lamps were gone – instead, small round, rusty cages hung from the ceiling, each containing a lump of flesh that looked a … deformed fetus? Whatever was trapped in those cages, Matt didn't want to stare at them a lot and moved his gaze down and away from the ceiling.

The shelves were empty. Where there had been hundreds of books, CD's, movies and games just before, there was now only dust and a few (luckily motionless) stains of blood. The walls and floor were filthy and all the windows had been boarded up.

Carpenter Library wasn't silent anymore. He could hear all kinds of strange muffled noises – children shrieking with laughter, demons grunting and snarling … 

Clutching his table leg, Matt wandered through the children's department of the library. There was a horrible stench of decay here. He had never smelled a stench so loathsome before in his life, except for back when he was a kid, visiting his grandfather's farm in Sweden. "_God, that place smelled like shit. Probably because of all the pigs and …_"

His thought was interrupted by the sound of his radio which was beginning to play static again. "_But where's the mon…_"

The Cerberus attacked him from behind and Matt tumbled down, gasping. He scrambled to his feet and (aware of the fact that a metal table leg was a very weak weapon against a creature like this one) ran away. He fled down the aisle, pursued by the hellhound, turned left at the corner and was about to rush down yet another aisle when he noticed the shotgun shells seated on the shelf. 

Smiling, he grabbed the ammunition and dropped the table leg. 

The Cerberus came around the corner, all three heads screeching, white froth and slobber emanating from the mouth of the middle head. Matt fumbled. The Cerberus ran towards him. Matt reloaded the shotgun. The Cerberus jumped and sailed through the air towards its victim. Matt pulled the trigger.

While the monster was in mid-air, a bullet plunged into the red jaws of its middle face. The odious creature flew backwards and landed on the filthy floor. 

"Bull's-eye," Matt mumbled. Even though the radio was silent, he stamped on the Cerberus a couple of times for safety's sake. There were five shots left in the shotgun. He picked up the table leg and stuffed it into his backpack, thinking that he wouldn't be needing that for a while.

And so, he continued exploring the Otherworld version of the children's department. The pool table had been replaced by a gory hospital stretcher and the armchair Tommy had been sitting in was now a blood-stained weelchair. On one of the shelves, he found two small white cards. On one of them, a single word was written with big, black letters: **ANGER**. On the other one, someone had written the word **AVARICE**. Matt frowned and placed them in his pocket.

Later on, after exploring the entire children's department and finding no more useful items or exits, he reached the area between the departments for kids and adults. This was where there used to be some counters, desks and a floor – unfortunately, none of these three things were present now. All that was left was a big, dark gap. Standing at the edge, peering down, Matt couldn't see the bottom of the chasm. The only way to get to the adult department on the other side was a narrow bridge above the middle of the hole, stretched out between the two departments like a crude metaphor for the puberty years of a man's life. The bridge appeared to be made of gory flesh and it looked slippery.

"Good thing I'm not afraid of heights," Matt muttered and stepped onto the bridge even though he was still scared as hell. "_Crawl, don't walk … unless you want to stumble and fall into this bottomless pit_," a little voice said in his head. Of course, that was ridiculous – there are no such things as bottomless pits … but for safety's sake, Matt got on his hands and knees and began crawling gingerly across the bridge three seconds after stepping onto it. He could see the door at the top of the stairs in the entrance hall to his right. It was open. If only he could make that jump to the doorway, he could go down the stairs and get out of this hellish building …

Finally, after what had seemed like an eon, Matt reached the other side of the gap and stood.

As he walked around in the adult department – where the shelves were now utterly devoid of any books, CD's, movies, magazines or newspapers – he discovered two more of those cards. The words written on these new cards were **ENVY **and **GLUTTONY**. 

"_Are these cards about the seven deadly sins_?" Matt mused, snatched "envy" and "gluttony" from the shelf and placed them in his pocket.

He also discovered a little wooden box seated on a table. He lifted it – "_not very heavy_" – and shook it – "_something inside? Sounds like some kind of small object_ …" When he tried opening it, he discovered that it was locked. "_Dammit__. Gotta find the key …_" he thought and wandered away.

Later on, he found Stu sitting at a table in the area where there used to be newspapers on the shelves. The former anthropology teacher was reading a bulky book with pages that had grown yellow a long time ago. 

"And so we meet again," Matt said, enjoying the way Stu started when he heard Matt's voice.

"Jeez, you scared the daylights outta me," Stu said and closed the book. Matt noticed that the title was "Lost Memories".

"Lost Memories? What kind of book is that?"

"It's about the ancient religion and history of this town," Stu explained, "very interesting. You should try reading it yourself."

"No thanks. I'll pass the time trying to find a way out of here instead," Matt replied. "Anyway, why didn't you wait for me at Neely's Bar? I was only in there for a few minutes, and when I came back out, you were gone."

"A few minutes? You were in there for at least an hour."

"What?"

"I couldn't just stand there freezing my nuts off all day, so I went into the nearest building and I've been here ever since."

"But I was only in that bar for a couple of minutes …"

"Yeah, well … a few minutes to you, an hour to me. This place is messing about with our minds, you know."

Matt thought about all the weird stuff he had experienced since he met Stu for the first time and nodded. "I guess you're right. It's like a nightmare … I wish I could wake up in the plane and it would all just have been a bad dream."

"The plane?" Stu said.

Matt explained how he had ended up in Silent Hill.

"Ah, interesting," Stu remarked, "and you were the only survivor – isn't that a strange coincidence, Matt? … The Gods must have really wanted to punish you, if they have gone to all that trouble just to get you here. I mean, a lot of sinners end up here because of car accidents, but a plane crash … that's new."

"Sinners?"

"Murderers, rapists, thugs …"

"Wait a minute. Are you insinuating that I've done something horrible like that?"

"Well, you must have done _something_ to end up here."

"Jesus Christ," Matt muttered. "So what did you do? Murder, robbery?"

"No, nothing like that …" Stu said. He suddenly sounded like he was talking to himself, not aware of Matt's presence. "But she was so young … so beautiful …" Then he was clearly directing his attention to Matt again: "I don't want to talk about it."

"Er … okay. So, what's with the door over there?" Matt asked, pointing to the metal door in the wall behind Stu's table. One word was written on the plate: **TELEPHONE**.

"I don't know," Stu said while Matt walked up to the door to try opening it, "but it's locked and I have no idea where the key is."

"Great. Well, have you seen some kids around here? A boy and a girl, both with black hair …"

"Nope. Who are they?"

"I'm not sure. The boy said that they're brother and sister, just before he ran off."

"Ran off?"

"It's a long story. Anyway, have you seen a young woman around here? Her name's Daryl. I can't remember her last name – it was something-man … oh yeah, Thurman."

"No, I haven't met anyone else around here except for a woman named Angela and some of the cult members."

"Cult members?"

"Yeah, there's a cult in Silent Hill. The Order."

"And you're in it, right?"

"No, I'd never join. It's really silly. Just a bunch of morons who believe that "God" is going to come and save mankind someday and give us all "salvation" and "Paradise"," Stu spat.

"And isn't that what you believe?" Matt said, recalling what Stu had told him about gods and the "Time of the Awakening" back on Sanders Street.

"Oh, I _know_ that God will come to our world someday, but I'm not looking forward to the so-called Miraculous Descent. If there was anything I could do to prevent it, I would be doing that right now. But I guess our only hope is Metatron's interference now."

"Whatever," Matt said and ran his eyes over the table Stu was sitting at. There was a small bronze key lying on it. "Could I take that key? I think it might be …"

"Go ahead. It's not the key for that "telephone" door, though – I've already tried that," Stu said, once more reading his "Lost Memories". 

Matt snatched the key, muttered "see you later" and then backtracked to the box on the table. He stuck the key into the keyhole, turned it and pulled the lid back. 

It turned out that the box only contained an ornate key and three white cards: **LUST**, **PRIDE** and **SLOTH**.

"Great, I've got the entire set. Now, what am I supposed to do with them?" Matt mumbled as he placed the cards and key in his pocket.

When he got back to the area with the "telephone" door, Stu was gone. The thick book, "Lost Memories", was still lying on the table. Matt sat down and read some of it.

**… one of them. But unlike his "colleagues", Amamet specializes not in gathering new believers or preparing the Second Creation of ****Paradise****, but in showing sinners the right path and punishing them when they refrain from following it. It is indeed an angel, but the legends only give us this scant piece of information about his purpose. While he is also known as "Hagio Anemo" ("Holy Wind"), the original worshippers usually used the name Amamet when writing about this creature …**

Matt leafed through the rest of the book. It seemed "Lost Memories" was about all kinds of occult ceremonies and legends, gods and angels. Not very interesting to him at the moment.

He left the book on the table and tried unlocking the "telephone" door with the key he had found in the box, but alas, he was supposed to use the key somewhere else.

Ready to shoot anything that might suddenly jump out of the shadows, Matt continued exploring the demented building until he found yet another locked door. But, unlike the stupid "telephone" door, he was able to unlock this one with the ornate key.

He was about to step into the room beyond the doorway when he fortunately noticed that it didn't have a floor. A ladder went down from the threshold to the floor of what was probably the 1F hall where he had met Daryl. 

Aware of the fact that there had certainly not been a ladder here before and wondering why and how the library had suddenly changed like this, Matt climbed down the ladder to the northeast corner at the bottom of the art exhibition hall. While he climbed down, the radio began to play static once more.

When he reached the floor, a new monster greeted him. It had the small body of a child, but it looked like someone had pulled its skin off, revealing its pulsating flesh. It wore the same t-shirt and unbuttoned raincoat Amanda had been wearing, but these clothes were filthy and drenched in blood. Its feet had grown together and it walked on crutches, making a sad noise that almost sounded like a human being, crying. Therefore, Matt named it a Weeper. Its head was wrapped in bandages soaked in a gooey yellowish liquid – "_Tears?_"

Unable to figure out how this creature could possibly attack him, Matt didn't consider it dangerous … until the Weeper got close enough to swing its legs up towards him as gracefully as a gymnast. From three gross holes in the soles of its joined feet, three razor-sharp blades were suddenly shot out a few feet until they couldn't get any further. One of them made a little gash in Matt's left arm. He screamed in pain as the Weeper retracted its claw-like weapons and its feet returned to the floor.

Matt aimed and pulled the trigger. The Weeper staggered back, dropped the crutches and fell to the floor where it continued crying until Matt had kicked it a couple of times. He used the contents of his first-aid kit to patch up the gash and extinguish the pain.

Then he stared at the dead abomination for a while. "_This place just keeps getting crazier. Or maybe I'm the one getting crazier all the time …_" A tear emerged from his left eye and began travelling down across his face, but was soon wiped off by his hand. "_Cut it out, Matt. This is neither the time nor place for sobbing. You've got more important stuff to do, like trying to find a way outta here …_"

The exhibition hall had also changed. The square pillars that had supported the ceiling were now gone. Instead, there was a strange monument in the middle of the hall: a round pillar that looked like it had been severed at the middle. It went from the floor and halfway up to the ceiling, then it abruptly stopped.  "_I wonder where the other half is?_" A large painting had been nailed onto the ceiling above the pillar. It depicted a young Caucasian woman wearing a ridiculously long scarlet gown. The beautiful lady had a reproachful look on her face. From where he was standing, Matt could see a caption at what was probably the bottom of the frame: "**GOD, SHE WHO IS ETERNAL AND OMNIPOTENT**".

The lamps in this hall had also been transformed into cages, each containing what looked like a deformed fetus. The windows had disappeared, and all that was left was a big dark wall. The doorway between the 1F entrance hall and the exhibition hall had also vanished and a crude picture of the formerly existent door had been painted on the wall exactly where the exit used to be, as if the artist was attempting to induce Matt to believe that nothing had changed.

All the nice, normal paintings that had been displayed when Matt was here with Daryl were gone now. Besides "God", there were seven new paintings hanging in a circle on the surface of the round pillar. Matt walked up to the pillar and strolled around it, examining the images. He soon drew a conclusion: They were about the seven deadly sins. 

There were small indentations in the bottoms of the frames, where captions would have been seated under normal circumstances. Maybe if he placed the right cards in the right indentations …

In one of the paintings, Matt saw a woman holding a purse. Rats and toads crawled and jumped around at her feet. Matt placed the "Avarice" card in the frame of this work and moved on to the next painting, which depicted a woman tearing up her clothes. He stuck the "Envy" card into the frame.

Now the paintings began to get creepy. The next picture he found portrayed a naked woman who had torn open her chest and pulled out her entrails. She was devouring them with a fierce look on her blood-spattered face. Matt placed the "Anger" card below this picture.

He continued walking around the pillar until he found yet another painting. A corpulent woman stood in the middle of the canvas, pigs and wolves walking around her in a circle. Matt placed the "Gluttony" card below her.

The next painting he discovered depicted a woman with a peacock sitting on her head. Without hesitation, Matt placed the "Pride" card in the frame of this painting. After that, he reached a picture of an overweight man riding an ox and stuck the "Sloth" card into the indentation of this painting's frame.

The last painting he found depicted a beautiful naked woman lying on a bed. Cats were walking around the bed, and snakes and toads were feeding on her breasts and genitals. He placed the "Lust" card below the strange image …

Nothing happened.

"Shit." He tried switching the "Anger" and "Envy" cards, and now something did happen.

Light seemed to seep out of the painting of "God" on the ceiling. The light suddenly divided into seven beams that whizzed down to the seven paintings. It was so bright Matt had to cover his eyes as he staggered back from the pillar which was now completely enveloped in light …

Then he heard a loud explosion-like sound and the light disappeared. When he opened his eyes, the pillar and all the paintings were gone, and all that was left was a key with a tag, lying on the floor in the middle of the hall.

Matt picked it up and noticed that the tag said "Telephone". He smiled, slipped it into his pocket and climbed back up the ladder to the second floor.

---

A/N: "Tune in next week" … He he. Please tell me what you think about the sin puzzle and the "Weeper". –E.P.O.


	7. The Call

Chapter 7: The Call

The "telephone" door was still there when Matt got back to the reading room where he had met Stu. He got the key out of his pocket, unlocked the door, tucked the key back into his pocket and entered this new room.

It had probably been an office before the sirens had sounded and the building had changed. There were a few broken desks, printers, computers and chairs put up against the walls, where empty shelves stuck out and ordinary bulletin boards hung. This was where librarians had gone to do their computer work and paper pushing. But now, all their important tools and furniture had been shoved aside to make room for a strange arrangement in the middle of the office.

Someone had daubed a circle of blood on the floor. Inside the crimson circle, about 50 lit candles stood in a white circle, and inside this circle, a small table had been placed.

And there, on the marble table top in the middle of the room, just like the plate on the door had promised him: an ordinary modern phone.

Matt hurried across the room to the phone, stepping on the blood-circle on the way but not caring a damn, and picked up the receiver. 

Unlike all the other phones he had found in Silent Hill, this one wasn't broken.

He immediately dialled 911, but then the phone became completely silent. Matt now noticed that it wasn't even plugged in. "What the …" He hung up and picked up the receiver again. The "beep-beep-beep" sound was back. He tried calling some of his friends and relatives, but the phone still refused to let him contact the outside world (and, as he soon discovered through his trials, repeatedly muttering "shit" didn't improve the situation). Why was it even giving him a dial tone when it wasn't plugged in?

"_Maybe it's cursed by these circles,_" Matt thought, "_like some sort of black magic_ …" Having spent 41 years in this world, he didn't believe in black magic and occult stuff, although ever since seeing that Stewardess in the plane, Matt hadn't really known what to believe.

He kicked one of the candles. It flew a few feet out of its circle before it landed on the damp floor and the flame passed away to a better place. He once more picked up the receiver and tried dialling a randomly chosen number.

Nothing. No "hello, who is this?", no "beep-beep-beep", nothing. 

"Fuck it," Matt said, hung up and began contemplating the bulletin boards. A paper attached to the middle of one of the boards, between all kinds of boring messages, schedules and photos of the librarians's loved ones, held his attention. At a glance, it seemed to be an ordinary typewritten memo, but there was actually something very strange about it:

**TO ALL EMPLOYEES - Remember to call the following number in an emergency: Days in a week. Rivers that flow from the Tree of Life in paradise. Crosses on ****Golgotha****.**** Choirs of angels in Christianity. Death and eternity. Furies. Loneliness so sad. Satan the Beast.**

"What? … Oh, I get it. It's a number for the phone … with eight digits." Matt took the memo back with him to the phone and began dialling.

"Days in a week. That's easy," he mumbled and pressed 7 with his left hand while holding the receiver up to his ear with his right hand. "Rivers that flow from the Tree … 4, I guess. Crosses on Golgotha …" Despite Matt's lack of knowledge about certain stories in the Bible, he managed to recall that there had (at least according to the "holy book" itself) been three crosses on that particular silent hill. He pressed 3 and continued talking to himself: "Choirs of angels … er … 9? Death and eternity, that must be the number 0. And there were 3 furies … Loneliness so sad? Well, it takes 1 to be lonely … And lastly, Satan the Beast?"

Remembering the three-digit number venerated by so many lame bands and their teenage fans, Matt pressed 6.

_Beeeep__ … beeeep … beeeep …_

The phone rang. "_I wonder who I'm calling?_" Matt didn't know anyone with the phone number 74390316 - yet. "_It's gotta be someone who will help me … someone living outside this town …_"

The phone continued ringing. "_Beeeep__ … beeeep …_"

"Come on … pick it up, pick it up, pick it up," he droned, not in the mood for leaving a message.

He had been standing there for two minutes, waiting, hoping, expecting, when someone did answer the phone. But it wasn't the oh-so-wonderful rescuing angel he had hoped for. It was Tommy. And he sounded scared.

"Matt? Is that you?"

"Yeah, how did you know?"

"You've got to come and … do something. Save me," Tommy whispered, sobbing.

"What's wrong?"

"She's in here with me … she's hurting me … the monster," Tommy stuttered.

"What is, uh, I mean, where are you?"

"The church …"

"Okay, a church … Which one? There's a Balkan Church and a St. Ste…"

"St. Stella's Church. I'm in the St. Stella's Church … Please, Matt, hurry. It hurts and I don't think I can …"

_Beep-beep-beep …_

Tommy had hung up – or maybe something had done that for him. "Dammit," Matt muttered and put down the receiver. "_How am I gonna get out of this library?_" He kicked another candle. It flew all the way to the wall and landed on a printer.

Then he noticed a rusty valve sticking out of the middle of the bulletin board where the phone number memo used to hang (_"where did that come from?"_). Big red letters had been written on the board just above the valve: **TURN 180 DEGREES TO THE RIGHT IN ORDER TO ACTIVATE EMERGENCY EXIT**. Too tired to wonder what the hell that was supposed to mean, Matt turned the valve 180 degrees just like whoever wrote that terse message had suggested. 

Nothing happened, although he did hear an odd crashing noise coming from somewhere west of the office. It sounded like fifteen empty trash cans hitting the ground after being thrown off a ten-storey building. 

Matt left the office and wandered back to the gap in the middle of the second floor. A second bridge of flesh had appeared, stretched out between the doorway at the top of the stairs and the middle of the other bridge. Drops of blood regularly fell from the bridges and into the darkness.

Matt got on his hands and knees and crawled out to the middle of the first bridge. Then he turned left and slowly made his way across the new bridge to the doorway, after which he scrambled to his feet and walked down the stairway in the entrance hall. Some of the steps were missing now, so he had to be careful. The sliding glass doors on the first floor were gone, and all that was left was a big wide doorway.

Shivering, he stepped out of Carpenter Public Library through this doorway and walked across the parking lot and up Harris St. towards the church. A carpet of snow covered the streets and while the fog had lifted, the darkness of the night now prevented him from seeing much of his surroundings as he footed it down Katz Street. Apart from the colours of a few parked cars, the world was black and white out here. Looking up at the sky, he couldn't see a single star. 

"_Please, Matt, hurry. It hurts and I don't think I can …_"

_Beep-beep-beep …_

He began to run.

---

A/N: Well, that turned out to be a short chapter. My boring work experience as a librarian is FINALLY over, so now I should have more time to update "Family". Yes, the "normal" version of Carpenter Library is (in my imagination) almost exactly like the library I was a trainee at, so it was funny describing the Otherworld library, hehe. –E.P.O. 


	8. Amamet

Chapter 8: Amamet

St. Stella's Church was a building with yellow brick walls, a snow-covered roof, stained glass-windows and an ominous tower. The high wooden doors were open.

Matt hadn't encountered any monsters on the way to the church, which was of course nice, yet creepy. With forebodings, he stepped into the building through the big gate-like entrance, clutching his shotgun. There were four shots left in it.

While the building looked like an ordinary church from the outside, it was very different inside the nave. There were only seven benches left and they were lying in a heap between the four pillars supporting the ceiling. The same rusty cages Matt had seen at Carpenter hung from the ceiling, hideous things twitching inside them, hymn books lying on the floor, torches burning at the walls. A couple of crucifixes hung on the pillars, but the two statues of Jesus were decapitated and blood appeared to have poured down from the necks, giving the originally brown wood a reddish colour. As Matt contemplated them, he thought he could still see scarlet drops trickle down from the throats.

Matt slowly made his way towards the altar. He walked around the heap of benches and then stopped when he saw the coffin.

It was lying up at the altar: an ordinary wooden coffin, with an open lid, as if a funeral was currently in full swing here. There weren't any flowers, though. Just that little coffin … and Matt wasn't sure he wanted to see who was in it.

Nevertheless, he walked past a blood-filled baptismal font and up to the coffin to take a look at its contents. 

It was Tommy. Tommy's dead body, with several ugly bruises and scrapes. Lying in the coffin with his hands folded over his stomach. A yellowish scrap of paper covered his face.

Matt gasped, drew back, tripped, fell, dropped the shotgun. With his face buried in his hands, he slowly stood. "This is not happening … I'm going to wake up in the plane soon …" he mumbled, attempting to pull himself together. 

But no matter what he said to himself, he knew this was not a dream. 

He walked back up to the corpse and removed the paper. The skin of Tommy's face was as pale as the skin on the rest of his body and his eyes were closed. Matt then read the eight words written on the paper with capital black letters:

**YOU'RE LATE**

**AMAMET IS READY FOR YOU NOW**

He immediately called to mind what he had read about this "angel" in "Lost Memories" back in the library's reading room. 

… **"specializes in showing sinners the right path and punishing them when they refrain from following it … also known as Hagio Anemo ("Holy Wind"), the original worshippers usually used the name Amamet …"**

Matt dropped the paper. It floated gracefully to the ground before the coffin. 

He suddenly heard the sound of doors being slammed shut and turned around. The big doors he had just opened when he entered the building were now closed and he knew at once that he wouldn't be able to budge them if he tried to get out. The pile of benches in the middle of the church was on fire, enveloped in menacing flames. The smoke and heat were slowly spreading … 

And there, on top of the fire in the middle of the flames, stood a dark shape. The fire should be illuminating it, but the figure seemed to be capable of tyrannizing over light itself. Its head had an odd, somewhat rectangular shape, like that of a hammerhead shark. It wore a ragged robe and strange black leather boots and its muscular arms were folded.  

As it walked down from the fire towards him, swiftly and easily stepping from bench to bench, it decided that it would let him see the rest of its body and the flames obeyed by illuminating it entirely, revealing more bizarre details. What Matt had assumed was part of the robe turned out to be gross tattered pieces of skin, stretched out between the elbows and knees like wings. From the elbows to the fingertips, long yellow latex gloves covered the creature's skin. Its face didn't have any features except for two parallel vertical slits ("_eyes? Mouths?"), although these were hardly actual features._ A strange 4 feet long sword had been driven through the head horizontally, the two ends sticking out of the "temples".

The flames seemed to ignore the being as it walked right through them without burning itself, almost like Moses wandering through the Red Sea without getting himself drowned. This was what convinced Matt that he was standing before something different than the other monsters. A so-called angel. Amamet … Was this the monster Tommy had mentioned?

"Were you the one who … who murdered Tommy and put him in that coffin? … Was it you? Can you even understand what I'm saying?" Matt stuttered. 

After reaching the bottom of the fire, Amamet raised his right arm to point at Matt and chanted something unintelligible in a weird language. The angel's voice actually didn't sound like one voice, it was more like several different voices intoning at the same time. The voices of children …

"_I dnatsrodnu gnityreve. Rafél mai amech izabi alm …_"

The voices trailed off. Amamet reached up with his right hand and pulled the sword out of his grotesque head. It was a long thin sword with no handles, just a long blade that seemed to be as deadly as that of a katana, both ends sharp. Apparently, the angel couldn't feel the pain a human being would feel if it was trying to wield such a weapon, or maybe the gloves just prevented the blade from cutting into his hands. Whatever the explanation was, he could easily handle the unusual sword. He reached back and held the sword above the nearest bench for a few seconds until it began to burn. Then, armed with the fiery sword, he walked towards Matt.

The latter was about to try aiming at the angel, when he realized he had dropped the shotgun. Matt snatched it from the floor and took aim, but before he could pull the trigger, Amamet swung the sword at him and the flat of the blade hit his chest.

Matt sailed back through the air until he hit the wall and the shotgun flew out of his grip once more. He didn't know what was worse – colliding with the wall, landing on the floor or the sensation of the fire burning through his t-shirt. Screaming in pain and horror, he scrambled to his feet. 

Luckily, the font was nearby.

Although he would have preferred water, the blood would have to be sufficient. He bent forward and plunged his chest into the gross liquid, extinguishing the flames and giving a new meaning to the expression "baptism of fire". 

Gasping and with blood dripping from his upper body, he rose out of the font and stumbled back in time to see Amamet cleave it with his sword. Pieces of stone fell to the ground and blood rushed across the floor, soaking the angel's boots and Matt's ordinary shoes.

Amamet roared with fury and, now holding the sword with both hands, ran towards Matt, who grabbed the shotgun from the floor, aimed for the being's head and squeezed the trigger. The bullet penetrated into the creature's shoulder with a nauseating "crunch" sound, but Amamet continued running as if the bullet had just whistled past him. 

He soon reached his victim and swung the sword in a horizontal curve, but Matt managed to dodge the attack by clumsily leaping sideways. He raised the shotgun and pulled the trigger again.

And again. And again. And …

Click.

"Oh shit," he muttered, dropped the shotgun and reached into his backpack to get the table leg. But he was too slow. Before he could produce the weapon, Amamet hit him with the flat of the fiery blade again and Matt's feet left the floor.

This time, he landed on a bench in the big fire in the middle of the church. His body was immediately shrouded in flames. The heat and pain was beyond endurance. Lying on the bench, he screamed and squirmed as the fire easily burned through his clothes and consumed his body.

Amamet merely stood there and looked on. Suddenly, he raised his arms, thus unfolding the skin between his knees and elbows, spreading his "wings", and gracefully rose from the floor. Floating in the air above the fire, he pointed at Matt and his unearthly voice(s) returned:

"_Ecarbme__ et semalf fho noispmeder …_"

Then, he turned around, flapped his wings, flew out of the largest window, crushing the stained glass, and disappeared in the cold black night.

As the fire devoured Matt's flesh and he heard the familiar faint sound of sirens, he knew that he was going to die now and there was nothing he could do about it. Then, everything vanished and only a huge overwhelming darkness was left …

---

_Truth may seem, but cannot be;_

_Beauty brag, but 't is not she;_

"Hey, wake up …"

_Truth and beauty buried be._

"Are you okay?"

Matt groaned. He had a slight headache. Someone was gently shaking him. He opened his eyes. It was Amanda, standing next to the bench he was lying on.

Memories flew through his mind – the heap, the fire, Amamet … He rose from the bench and stared at St. Stella's Church, stunned.

It was all back to normal. The cages were lamps again, containing bulbs, not deformed fetus. The font contained water and there wasn't any blood on his clothes and face anymore. The crucifixes were no longer beheaded and the hymn books were seated on their shelves. All the stained glass-windows were intact and the thirty wooden benches were placed in neat rows. There weren't any torches either, but the coffin was still there, up at the altar. The most notable change was of course that Matt was neither on fire nor dead or injured.

He sat down on the bench again and sighed. 

"Are you okay?" Amanda repeated.

"Uh, yeah. I … I'm just a little tired," he lied, driving his hand through his tangled hair. Apart from feeling extremely tired, he was also confused, uneasy and slightly depressed. "Why did you run away?"

"What?"

"Back in the library. You ran away, remember? And you threw a book at me … Actually, it turned out that I needed that book, so thanks."

"Dunno what you're talking about," the girl said and strolled away towards the middle aisle.

"_A kid with a short-term memory. Great,_" he thought.

Amanda turned around. "I don't like churches," she declared. "They're creepy, don't you think?"

"Well, this one certainly _was_ very creepy," Matt said and gave a wry smile.

"Huh?"

"Oh, never mind. Why are you here, if it's so creepy?" Matt asked.

"Well, it's not so creepy when you're here, too. Anyway, my brother said he was here, but when I got here, I couldn't find him. Then I saw you," Amanda replied.

"Your brother's Tommy, right?"

"Yeah, that's his name. I haven't seen him for a while. You don't know where he is, do you?"

Matt turned his gaze down to look at his shoes. "Err … well, he's not here."

"I already knew _that_," Amanda said, annoyed, and started walking down the aisle. "What's your name?" she asked.

"Matt."

"Don't you have a last name?"

"Hardt."

"Your last name's Heart?" The girl giggled. "They must have teased you a lot at school."

"It's spelled H-a-r-d-t," Matt explained and looked up at Amanda, who was strolling up to the coffin at the altar. 

_The coffin_ … 

Remembering Tommy's dead body, he rose from the bench and ran up to the girl. "Amanda, no! Stay away from that coffin! You don't …"

But the girl had already stopped when he yelled "no" and was now looking at him with a surprised look on her face. "It's too late for that," she said, "I already took a peek at it while you were sleeping. There's nothing inside."

"Whew," Matt said and walked up to it to put down the lid when he noticed the scrap of paper, shotgun and ammunition lying in the otherwise empty coffin. He picked up the paper. "I thought you said there was nothing inside?"

"Whoops. Guess I didn't notice that before," she said. "What does it say?"

"_Your next destination is __Brookhaven__Hospital__. There you may find your answers and new questions,_" Matt read aloud, "_but the entrance is locked. You can find the key in the Baby & Kids Super Store. Who I am does not matter. My existence is without meaning, while you have a journey to complete. Godspeed, damnable soul."_ Frowning, he folded up the paper and tucked it into his pocket.

"Didn't it say that there was a key to the hospital in the Baby & Kids Super Store?" Amanda said.

"Yeah, I think it said something like that," Matt said. "Do you know where that is?"

"Sure, it's right next to that bar on Neely St."

"Okay, I think I can find it, then. I'd better go there now – are you coming with me?"

"Of course," Amanda replied.

"Okay," Matt said and turned around to snatch his shotgun from the coffin. "But it's going to be dangerous, with all those monsters out there, so you need to stay close to … oh no."

When he had turned around, Amanda was gone. He was alone in the church.

"Goddammit," he muttered, took the shells from the coffin, reloaded the shotgun with shaking hands and walked down the aisle to the exit. 

The statues of Jesus watched him with sad looks on their faces, almost as if they felt sorry for the damned soul pushing the doors open. "Well, thanks for the pity," Matt mumbled and stepped out of the church, onto the sidewalk of a mist-shrouded Nathan Avenue.

---

A/N: "Tune in next week" … Hmmm, I wonder who will be the first to figure out what Amamet said? -E.P.O.


	9. A Key and Reunion

Chapter 9: A Key and Reunion

The fog twisted and twirled around Matt as he walked west on Nathan Ave. and down Neely St. 

His footsteps were the only sound his ears could intercept, except for the occasional crackling noise of the radio tucked into his pocket next to the flashlight and map. This noise was usually accompanied by the sobbing of a few Weepers, the yowling of a Cerberus or the groaning of a couple of Stewardesses. When Matt heard these sounds, he just ran until he could once more only hear his own footsteps.

It took a few minutes to get from St. Stella's to the store where the key to Brookhaven was probably hidden. It was a building about half as large as the church. "BABY & KIDS SUPER STORE" was written on a sign above the entrance. Another sign said that the store had "baby goods", "discount prices" and "baby gift registry".

Matt opened the door and stepped into a big room with a somewhat striking ceiling height. Just as he had expected, there weren't any customers or clerks in the building. Lots of diapers and clothes for kids could be found here on the first floor and a staircase led to the second floor where there were handbooks for the parents and playthings.

As Matt wandered further into the store, he discovered two Weepers lumbering around in the department with diapers. He managed to slip past them and up the stairs to the second floor where the radio became silent as death.

The shelves were filled with rattles and pacifiers. "Where could that stupid key be?" he muttered as he walked around and ran his eyes over his toy-filled surroundings. When he muttered this question, he thought he heard someone gasp with surprise. "_Was that just my imagination?_" he mused, not aware of the presence of someone else in the store, someone who was now thinking the exact same thing. 

He could hear the annoying, continuous noise of a ventilation fan. It only took him half a minute to find the source: an old-looking fan spinning in a filthy compartment inside the ceiling. The wind ventured down from the compartment through a rusty iron grating replacing the ceiling just below the 4 feet-diameter fan, which was spinning at a ludicrously high speed.

Daryl was standing beneath the fan, staring up at it. When Matt showed up, her attention immediately left the ceiling and she pulled a small handgun out of her pocket. "See this? I swear, if you …"

"Calm down, I'm not going to …"

"Just stay where you are, and drop the shotgun, and no one's gonna get hurt," Daryl said, her voice trembling.

"Look, I'll put the shotgun away, then you can put away your gun and we'll talk about all this," Matt said, feeling muzzy and angry at the same time, and slowly placed the shotgun on the floor. Daryl merely stood there, intent on not letting go of her weapon. "Did you follow me here or something?" she asked.

"No, I …"

"Then why are you here?"

"I, uh … I think there's a key around here that I need. Somewhere in this store."

"A key? To what?"

"The hospital … Brookhaven. Brookhaven Hospital."

Daryl sighed. "But why ... This just … all this doesn't make sense."

"I'm not insane, you know."

"No, I don't know, Matt. I mean, what happened back in the cafeteria? We were having a totally ordinary conversation, and then suddenly you're chopping up a table because you think it's a monster or something. How can you expect me to feel safe when you're … I mean …"

Awkward silence. Daryl couldn't finish her sentence and Matt just didn't know what to say. He wanted to tell the truth, but he also wanted to calm down Daryl … "I was on drugs," he lied.

"What?"

"Err … PTV," Matt elaborated, "I was on PTV." He had read about this in a newspaper some years ago. A drug known as PTV or White Claudia had been circulated among tourists in the town. "That's why I was seeing things, but I'm okay now. It's worn off."

"Well, I still don't know if I can trust you. What if … oh, never mind. You seem sane enough," Daryl said. "I tried LSD once, it was awful … But the shotgun stays on the floor for the time being. You said you were looking for a key?"

"Yeah."

"Well, there's one up there behind the fan. It's got a tag and it says something like "Ookhave"."

"Brookhaven?" Matt said and looked up. There was indeed a small key in the compartment, attached to the ceiling with tape.

"I guess. But you can't get it when that thing's spinning up there."

"Maybe there's a switch somewhere? In that office," Matt suggested, pointing to a half-open door behind the counter.

They stepped through the doorway into a brightly lit, narrow office. The two desks and chairs were cluttered up with documents. Daryl soon found a strange control panel on the wall. One of the switches was labelled "**VENT FAN ON/OFF**". "Okay, I think I've found it," Daryl said and flipped the switch to **OFF**.

"Great, I'll get the key," Matt said and moved one of the chairs out below the now stationary fan. Although his height was normal, the floor-to-ceiling height of the shop's second floor was rather majestic. Then, standing on the chair, he reached up and stretched his right hand through a gap in the grating and past the fan. 

While he groped for the key, paranoia slowly seeped into his mind. What if the fan suddenly began spinning again while his arm was in the compartment? What if Daryl turned it back on right now? Of course, there was no reason for her to do that, but around here, you never knew who you could trust …

After eight seconds of fumbling, he finally got the key and ripped it off the ceiling.

"You've turned pale," Daryl pointed out as Matt stepped down from the chair and slipped the key into his pocket. "Were you afraid I was going to turn the fan on and break your arm?" she asked and gave a wry smile.

"Yeah, something like that," Matt said, a faint smile quickly appearing on and disappearing from his tired face.

"So you got your key – what next?"

"I'll go to the hospital."

"Why? You're hoping they can do something about that cut on your arm?" Daryl said. She had just noticed the small gash caused by the attack of the Weeper back at the library. "You seem to have patched it up pretty well yourself."

"Oh, that. I found a first-aid kit, luckily."

"How did you get that cut?"

"It's a long story. Anyway, let's just go check out that hospital."

"Okay," Daryl said and shrugged. Then she picked up the shotgun and handed it over to Matt. "Here, I think I can trust you."

"Thanks," Matt said and crammed the weapon into his backpack.

They swiftly walked down the stairs to the first floor. The Weepers were still there, but they were now dead and lying on the floor, decapitated. Amamet stood still behind them, holding his fiery sword out to his right, the two heads of the Weepers skewered on it. "_Ehs__ liw egnahc,_" his voices chanted.

"What's wrong, Matt? What are you staring at?"

"Oh, err … nothing. I just … let's go," he said and walked out of the store as if he hadn't seen anything unusual. Daryl, who obviously couldn't see or hear the creatures, tagged along with him.

---

"So why are you here? I mean, in this town. Do you live here?" Matt asked as they footed it west on Rendell St., passing fences and brick walls. The relentless white fog constantly surrounded them. So far, they hadn't encountered any more monsters since leaving the Baby & Kids Super Store. 

"No, I just came here today," Daryl said.

"But why?"

"I'm looking for … someone."

"Who, who is it?"

"Someone very important to me," she replied, clearly intent on not telling her companion more about her reason for going to Silent Hill. "What about you?"

"Well, my plane crashed down nearby and I was the only survivor, so I followed a track through the forest, thinking I could get some help in this town. But then I found out there's no one here and all the phones are broken …"

"I'll bet the hospital's like that, too," Daryl said and sighed. They turned right and wandered north on Caroll St. "What could have happened here? This used to be a resort town, if my memory serves me."

"Yeah, I think I was here once, on holiday with someone," Matt said. "I can't really remember it, though. It was so peaceful back then …"

"And now it's a creepy ghost town," Daryl said. "It's funny how things change like that, isn't it?"

"Sometimes it's more sad than funny."

"Yeah, I guess. Life's weird … Hey look, that's the hospital, right?" Daryl pointed to a large three-storey building to their left. "Brookhaven Hospital" was written on the sign above the double doors. Matt produced the key from his pocket as they walked up to the entrance. He unlocked the door and they stepped inside.

---

A/N: He he, no SH-game or SH-game-ish fanfic without a hospital. This story takes place between SH2 and 3, so certain mentally ill patients might make cameos … "cameos". I love that word. Aaanyway, don't forget to tune in next week. –E.P.O. 


	10. Hymn

Chapter 10: Hymn

A disturbing silence filled the dark and damp hallway as they walked around in the deserted hospital. Matt illuminated their surroundings with the flashlight while Daryl tried every door they found. Most of them had broken locks, some were just locked. About a minute after entering the quiet building, they finally discovered a door that could easily be opened and stepped into a cramped room. 

A big quadratic piece of paper was lying on a desk. Matt picked up the paper and studied it. "Looks like a map of this place. So this room is the doctor's lounge …" He folded up the map and placed it in his pocket.

Daryl opened the refrigerator. "Weird. There's a newspaper in the fridge," she said and picked up an old-looking paper called "Silent Hill News". Frowning, she began to leaf through it. "Here's an interesting article: _Odd death at __Stepford__Day__Care__Center__ - Robert Woodhouse (age: 5) passed away last month at the town's day care center. According to witnesses, blood suddenly began to ooze from his entire body and a few seconds later, he died. While some witnesses claim that Alessa Gillespie (age: 5) killed Robert because he was victimizing her, it is naturally an impossible and utterly ridiculous thought that a child like her could be the culprit. Furthermore, Dr. Michael Kaufmann from the __Alchemilla__Hospital__ has announced that the cause of Robert's untimely demise was undoubtedly a rare disease known as congutriasis. The funeral will take place on the 7th of this month,_" Daryl read aloud.

"Congutriasis? I've never heard of that disease," Matt said.

"Well, it does say it's a rare one," Daryl said and dropped the paper on a nearby table. "So what do we do now?"

Matt shrugged. "Explore the rest of the hospital, I guess."

---

"Great, this one's locked, too," Daryl declared after trying the door to room C4. Matt marked the door on the map with a red marker he had found in the meeting room. "Now we've tried all the doors on this floor. So, should we go to the second floor?" he suggested. "Why not?" Daryl said.

They were walking across the 1F hallway to the elevator when the white noise of the radio returned. "_Shit, not another monster, not now …_"

Daryl stared at the radio in Matt's pocket. "What's that?"

"It's a portable radio," Matt explained.

"But why is it playing static all of a sudden? Is it broken?"

"I guess. It doesn't play any normal stations …"

"_…ly dark. I'm scared, and … here, to …_" The radio suddenly emitted Amanda's voice. "_No, get a … ease, hur … our, I'm in room C4 … ocked, I thi … key's in the bag in the electrical room, in the basement … urry, Matt …" _

Silence.

"Who was that?" Daryl said. 

"I, uh … I don't know," Matt said.

"But how did she know your name?"

"Beats me."

"She sounded really afraid. Poor girl … It was kinda hard to hear, but I think she said she was in room C4," Daryl said and pointed to the door at the other side of the hallway. "Right there."

"But it's locked."

"She said there was a key in the electrical room …"

"Yeah, but how are we gonna get there? The eastern elevator is the only one that goes down to the basement, but it isn't working, and the stairwell door's locked."

"So let's try it on the other floors," Daryl said.

They stepped into the elevator and ascended to the second floor.

---

Unfortunately, it turned out that the stairwell doors were also locked on the second and third floors. They were now searching for the key on the third floor. Daryl was convinced the key had to be somewhere in the hospital.

"Lock's broken," she muttered after trying the door to room S10. Matt marked the doorway with a wavy red line on the map and they moved on to S11. "Lock's broken," she droned. Matt marked the door and they continued to S12.

Their boring routine was broken when they discovered that this door could actually be opened. They stepped into a cramped room with a gross bed, one window and an old-fashioned, black phone seated on a small table.

A man with grey hair and blue eyes sat on the bed, staring at the fog drifting around outside the window. He looked like he was about 60 years old and wore a blue patient uniform. When they entered the room, he rose from the bed.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"I'm Matt, and this is Daryl," Matt informed him and held out his hand in a futile attempt to shake hands with the stranger. The latter just stood there and refused to touch Matt's hand. "What's your name?" Daryl asked the patient.

"Why do you want to know that?" he replied. "You're not so-called psychiatrists, are you? They usually visit me one at a time."

"Er … no, we're not psychiatrists," Matt said. "We just want to find a key to the stairwell. We need to get down to the basement."

"What's in the basement?" the patient asked.

"Another key, actually."

"Keys, keys, keys … That's what it's always about for you sinners. Doors to be opened, progress to be made," the patient muttered. "I don't know where you can find your silly key. I only care about one key, and that is the one to Paradise."

"_Yay__, another religious weirdo,_" Matt thought and ran his eyes over the room. A small, crumpled photo on the table got his attention. The smiling face of a little girl with long blonde hair was on it. A word had been scribbled on the bottom right corner. Matt picked up the photo. "Who's this?" he asked and began to read aloud: "Clau…"

"DON'T TOUCH THAT, YOU FILTHY UNBELIEVER!" the patient yelled and snatched the photo from Matt's hand. He then placed it back on the table, pushed Daryl and Matt out of the room with surprising force and slammed the door shut.

"I guess we should leave that guy alone. It's not as if he'll tell us something useful," Daryl said after they had stood up. "Amen to that," Matt said as they began to walk down the hallway again.

In room S14 at the end of the hallway, they found an open, empty box lying on a bed. On the wall, someone had written a few strange words in blood:

**NO IT ISNT HAPENNING! HE STOULE MY LOUISE MY SWEET LOUISE HE STOULE HER! I HATE HIM I HATE THEM ALL**

"What the …" Matt mumbled. 

""What the …" indeed," Daryl said. She then crouched down to look under the bed, picked up a little key that had been hidden down there and stood. "The tag says "stairwell" … I told ya we would find it sooner or later," she said, smiling.

---

Daryl unlocked the door and they stepped into a dark stairwell. There was a cinnamon-ish smell in the air and small cobwebs were seated at the corners of the ceiling, their architects gone. 

They walked down the stairs into an underground hallway, brightly lit by fluorescent tubes. Following the map, they stepped into the small "electrical room" next to the stairwell.

It contained several computers, TV's with black screens and a generator. A black bag was lying on a desk. Matt tried opening it, but it was locked. Four small golden wheels with symbols engraved on them constituted the lock: an hourglass, a hand, an eye and a sun. He could turn the tiny wheels all he liked, but he didn't know the correct combination. "Dammit."

Daryl was searching the pockets of a white coat hanging on a hall stand in the corner of the room. Her right hand emerged from one of the pockets with a strange little book. The words "**Halo of the Sun**" were written on the cover. She started to flick through it. "It's like a hymn book … but there's something weird about all these prayers and hymns. They're not … well, they're not Christian."

Matt was busy trying all kinds of random combinations to open the suitcase, when Daryl discovered a hymn with a red circle drawn around it. The hymn didn't seem very different from the other ones. It had five verses:

**The pain and suffering so great**

**Happiness they could not find**

**Only terror, sorrow and hate**

**Desire in every mind**

****

**Just two people, salvation nigh,**

**Gave you life, gave the world life,**

**Only a tear fell from your eye,**

**Holy blood from the priest's knife**

****

**They all suddenly stop their fight**

**As you from the darkness rise**

**And your hand brings the divine light**

**Brings the road to ****Paradise******

****

**Now the eternal moment ends**

**Come the morning of night and day**

**Time is created, not a fiend,**

**It does forever what you say**

****

**Never will we forget what was**

**Never forget when, never who**

**You, the sun, shining on us,**

**We will forever wait for you**

****

"What a crappy hymn," Daryl mumbled. Then she got it. An eye in the second verse, a hand in the third one, time in the fourth and the sun in the fifth. Eye – hand – time – sun …

---

"How the hell did you know the combination for that bag?" Matt said. They were making their way up the stairs to the first floor. 

"It's a long story," Daryl replied. There hadn't been anything useful or interesting in the bag, except for a little key which was now resting in her pocket.

"Don't we have time for long stories?"

"No, we don't have time. Remember that little girl?" Daryl reminded her companion as they ran down the hallway to room C4.

---

A/N: "TINW" (tune in next week) … Jake Blackthorn's right – Amamet is just talking backwards. And Karry: SH4 isn't out yet, but Konami have released a few details about the plot and characters, and even some great samples from the official soundtrack. –E.P.O.


	11. Descending into Madness

Chapter 11: Descending into Madness

Daryl pulled the key out from her pocket and unlocked the door while Matt trained the flashlight's beam on the lock to reduce the fumbling of his companion. The sirens from Carpenter Library and the church once more began to wail. They pushed the door open and tripped into room C4.

It wasn't very different than the other hospital rooms. Mattresses and pillows were lying in a mess and you could see nothing but fog drifting around outside the two windows. Amanda stood at the back of the room, next to Sophie, whose left hand was resting on the kid's head. They were both smiling. The filthy skin emerged from Amanda's scalp and slowly covered their bodies, easily sliding over bulges and squeezing into depressions, clinging to their normal skin like wet clothes.

Daryl looked calm and slightly confused. She slipped the key into her pocket and said something, but Matt couldn't hear it – he could only hear the sirens and the slurping sound of the skin creeping across Amanda's face and Sophie's arm. When he looked back at the windows, the grey fog had been replaced by black darkness. Daryl stared at him and her mouth moved again, but Matt couldn't intercept a single word.

A violent headache overwhelmed him and he slumped down to the floor. A worried look appeared on Daryl's face and she yelled something – this time, he managed to hear it …

… "_Matt, are you allright? What's wrong? Is it the PTV? Answer me, dammit …_"

… but then Daryl's body faded away from his vision and only him, Sophie and Amanda were left in the room. Lying on the floor, he could see the blood swimming around on the ceiling and hear the deafening sirens …

For the third time since he had entered this town, he lost consciousness.

---

Someone was chuckling.

Matt opened his eyes to discover that the ceiling was back to normal. Well, it wasn't completely normal, but at least the blood on it wasn't moving. Strange rubber tubes now hung from the ceiling, drops of a hot resinous substance regularly falling out of them.

Bumping against the gross tubes, he scrambled to his feet and scanned the Otherworld version of room C4. The mattresses and pillows were gone and a white screen partially covered the wall at the back. On a small table in front of the screen, an old-fashioned contraption was seated. Matt gingerly examined it.

"_A movie projector?__ So that screen's for showing movies … But what is this stuff doing here?_"

A body under a white blanket was lying on a stretcher in the corner. The happy chuckling sounds were clearly coming from that body, but Matt didn't want to check it out. Chuckling people on hospital stretchers were rarely good company, and besides, his radio was playing static.

He tried opening the door to the hallway, but it was locked. Hesitating for a moment before making the decision, he walked past the projector, up to the stretcher, and pulled the blanket off.

The body jumped up from the stretcher. It looked like the nasty remains of what was once a man, a doctor. It wore a white lab jacket and held a black revolver in its bony right hand. Its head was missing the nose, eyes and ears – in fact, it was missing the very _skin_ that should be covering the flesh and the cracked skull. Chuckling like a child playing with a teddy bear and staggering towards Matt, the Doctor raised the revolver to take aim at its victim …

The bullet flew through the air and plunged into the Doctor's thigh. The chuckling grew louder for a few seconds ("_Is that thing _enjoying _the pain?_") as the creature stumbled back and almost toppled. But the monster was soon staggering towards its prey once more, holding the revolver with both hands, taking good aim. Matt fired the shotgun again. This time, the Doctor fell to the floor where it lay so still, you would have thought it was dead if you couldn't hear the radio's white noise and the insane chuckling.

Matt kicked the creature's head a few times and silence filled the room. With four shots left in the shotgun now, he picked up the revolver and examined it. It contained eight bullets and there was room for two more.

There was something familiar about it. Where had he seen this weapon? Had he used it before? But when, where, why … He couldn't remember the answers – or actually, he didn't want to remember the answers. He stuffed the revolver into his left trouser pocket and then searched the pockets of the Doctor's white coat. In one of them, he discovered the key to room C4.

"_But I thought Daryl had that key – or maybe there are two keys? Or maybe this isn't really a monster and I just killed …_" He shuddered, unlocked the door and stepped out of the room, into the 1F patient wing hallway.

Those tubes were now dangling from the ceiling out here, too. The walls had also changed – they were scratched and dented, as if a hundred nails and hammers had been used to redecorate the place while he had been unconscious.

A few Nurses, wearing white latex gloves, knocked against the tubes as they strolled around in the hallway. Like the Doctors, they might once have been ordinary nurses working at this hospital. But now their skin was cold and bluish, their uniforms filthy and reeking of decay. Ludicrously wide horizontal fissures and black eye-like bulges constituted their faces. Their upper bodies hung slantingly backwards and their arms were jerking as if they were having some kind of seizure. They were armed with those black revolvers, too.

Matt didn't want to fight any monsters unless he had to, so he ran through the hallway and swiftly tried the doors. As long as he kept moving, the Nurses didn't have time to aim properly and shoot.

It appeared that the only other room he could enter on the first floor was the day room. It was fairly large, with four pillars supporting the ceiling. A somewhat crude bronze statuette was seated on a table in the middle. The statuette represented some kind of snake. It looked mainly like a rattlesnake and, placed on the table in the middle of the room, seemed pretty important to Matt, who snatched the figurine and crammed it into his backpack.

He ran back through the hallway, got into the elevator, pressed the "2" button and felt the narrow metal box rise to the second floor. Suddenly, he heard loud white noise, but it wasn't coming from his radio …

"_… and welcome to yet another edition of Silent Hill's most popular quiz, Trick or Treat!_"

The annoying voice wasn't coming from his radio, either. He could hear an audience, too, shouting with joy. What was going on?

"_Well, you all know the drill: Answer the three questions correctly and win the prize, or don't answer correctly and receive our punishment,_" the voice continued. "_And tonight's challenger is MATT HARDT!" _The audience's applause was deafening. "_Matt, are you ready to play TRICK OR TREAT?_" the host bellowed.

"How the fuck do you know my name?" Matt yelled.

"_Now then, let's not have that kind of language in the show. Anyway, here's your very first question: Around 1850, a coal field was discovered around here and a coal mine opened. What's the name of this coal mine? 1. Silent Hill Coal Mine – 2. Gallo Coal Mine – 3. Wiltse Coal Mine. _

_Now, let's move on to the second question: There are two normal churches in this town, St. Stella's Church on this side of the lake and, in the residential area … 1. St. Maria's Church – 2. Balkan Church – 3. LemegetonChurch._

_And here's your last question, the third one: Once upon a time, something strange happened at StepfordDayCareCenter, the town's nursery. A boy began to bleed all at once. The blood emerged from all over his body, from his nostrils, from his mouth, from his eyes … The pain must have been unbearable … yes, all he could feel was pain … And then he died. What was the name of the poor boy who had to suffer this awful fate? 1. Robert Woodhouse – 2. Joseph Maybrick – 3. Richard Bullock …_

_ Well, that's it. No more questions. Go to the day room on the first floor to find out whether you can give the correct answers. But remember, Matt, if you answer correctly, you'll get a WONDERFUL prize, and if your answers are wrong, you WILL be punished. So, everybody, thank you all for tuning in, see you later! Bye …_"

The noise vanished and the elevator was silent again. Matt started when the doors opened to the 2F hallway, which was fairly dark and devoid of both monsters and the weird rubber tubes.

As he was walking down the hallway and trying the doors, something gooey suddenly landed on his left arm. He looked down at it: slobber. A gross lump of slobber.

He looked up at the ceiling it had fallen from. It turned out that there were several dead babies hanging upside-down, like bats, from a steel wire suspended just below the ceiling, throughout the entire hallway. There had to be at least fifty babies hanging up there, on that sick festoon. Slaver was still falling down from some of the infants's mouths …

He tried to yell "oh shit", but no words would come out. He couldn't stay in this place any longer, not when he knew what was up there at the ceiling … He staggered down the hallway until he found a door that would open. Feeling like his brain had fallen to his stomach and his bowels had climbed up to his head, Matt stepped into the rest room and vomited in the nearest toilet.

"_It's too hard like this. It's just too hard …_"

He fell to the floor and stared up at the ceiling. Tears soon began to blur his vision.

---

Looking at his tired visage in the mirror, Matt wiped the wet streaks off his left cheek and heaved a deep sigh. Black letters written on the glass partially concealed his brown hair and forehead:

**The Midwife is in the ofice wing, you must go theire**

"Whatever," he mumbled. The doors to the office wing were locked on the first and second floors, and he had a feeling it would be the same on the third floor. And who was the "Midwife", anyway? Another monster?

He left the rest room and walked through the hallway, trying the rest of the doors. There were a few Doctors and Nurses here now. Luckily, they were "only" armed with scalpels, so he could easily avoid their attacks and didn't need to shoot them. Intent on not looking up at the festoon, he made his way through the hallway and entered room M6.

---

A/N: Yet another short chapter, I know, but at least it didn't have a cliffhanger ending. Thanks for all the praising reviews, it's good to know that at least I'm good at writing this stuff – (glares at the results of his annual examination at school) … -E.P.O.


	12. Offerings

Chapter 12: Offerings

The first thing he noticed about room M6 was Amamet.

The angel was sitting at the back of the room with his sword once more piercing his head and no longer burning. He sat in the classic meditating Buddha position, legs folded up beneath the torso. However, his arms were raised above his shoulders, and the head was turned slightly upwards to look at the painting in front of it.

The painting was the second thing Matt noticed about the room. It was fairly large and had a gilded frame. The woman from the ceiling of the alternative art exhibition hall was back, floating in the middle of the canvas, still wearing that long scarlet gown.

As Amamet sat there and stared into the lady's eyes, his voices whispered something Matt could barely hear …

"_… I emoc htiw ytiralc morf no hgih, gnivird feirg morf rieht sluos dna gof morf rieht seye …_"

Was it some sort of prayer? Was that thing actually worshipping the lady in the painting? There were even two lit candles placed on either side of the picture.

Suddenly, Amamet seemed to notice Matt's presence somehow. In one quick, fluid movement, the creature stood, grabbed the sword and ripped it out from his head, swung it through the flame of a candle, turned around and rose into the air, pointing the soon fiery weapon down at Matt. Then, the angel flew across the room, through the doorway and down the hall outside. Fortunately, Matt had time to jump away before the sword pierced his throat. He could hear the Doctors and Nurses in the hallway screaming (in awe?) as Amamet tore past them.

With shaking hands, he closed the door before examining the room. There wasn't much to examine – only the candles and the painting. The caption at the bottom of the frame said "**Lord of Serpents and Reeds**". Where had he heard that before?

The pale hands of the God were 3D, literally sticking out of the painting. It looked like they were supposed to be holding something.

There was something almost hypnotizing about the image. He stared it for quite a while before he decided to go explore the rest of the hospital. It wasn't that the lady was very beautiful or sexy – there was just something so otherworldly about her …

---

Back in the elevator, he pressed the "1" button. That weird voice had told him he should go to the day room on this floor, and although Matt wasn't sure whether there would be anything useful there now, he thought he might as well check it out before going to the third floor.

It turned out that a strange box was now seated on the table where he had found the snake. The box was surprisingly heavy and a colourful array of gems were stuck to its sides. It looked very out of place, here in this hellish building. He tried to take a look at its contents, but the box was locked.

There were nine buttons on the lid, arranged in a square. Above the square, there were three numbers: 01, 02 and 03, each number placed above its vertical row of buttons. To the left of the square, there was a vertical row of three other numbers: 1, 2 and 3, each placed to the left of its horizontal row of buttons.

Matt figured the numbers to the left of the square represented the questions he had been asked and the numbers above represented the multiple answers. Now all he had to do was press the correct three buttons, and the box would surely open so he could snatch his prizes …

What was the first question again?

"_… what's the name of this coal mine? 1. Silent Hill Coal Mine – 2. Gallo Coal Mine – 3. Wiltse Coal Mine …_"

He hesitated a little, then pressed the button in the upper left corner. A coal mine in Silent Hill would of course be called Silent Hill Coal Mine, right?

The next question … about the church in the residential area, what was its name? He produced the map from his pocket and soon found out that it was called the Balkan Church. "Easy," he mumbled and pressed the 02 button in the second horizontal row of answers.

And the last one, about the kid who had died at the day care center. "_What was the name of the poor boy who had to suffer this awful fate? 1. Robert Woodhouse …_" Of course, that's what the newspaper article had said, it was Robert Woodhouse. He pressed the 01 button in the lowest row.

Suddenly, the lid flew open, hitting Matt's hand, and something hot, red and fluid sprayed out from the box and covered his face …

Blood.

Matt stumbled back and quickly wiped it off as thoroughly as possible. "Well, that was a crappy prize," he thought aloud.

"_Oh, but that wasn't the prize. This is your punishment for not answering correctly. You shouldn't have participated, when you don't know the answers. Silly human …_" It was the voice from the elevator. The uproarious applause and cheerful cries of the audience were back, too.

The blood was no longer spraying out of the box. It was slowly trickling down the sides. The red streaks reached the table top and crawled across the wood, spreading out from the box in a perfect symmetrical pattern. They were soon sliding down the table legs and continuing across the floor.

"_Silent Hill's coal mine isn't called Silent Hill Coal Mine. It's called Wiltse Coal Mine. But you didn't know this, so you won't get your prize …_"

Something was very wrong in here. The blood streaks defied gravity by crawling up the pillars and walls and venturing across the ceiling at snail's pace. The normal white walls were transforming into a blurred crimson ocean.

"_Join the audience, Matt. We all look forward to having you here amongst us for the next editions …_"

A headache popped up in his head and he began to feel dizzy.

The blood was covering the entire room now. Everything was crimson, except him.

But now, tiny streaks crawled up his legs, soaking his pants, absorbing him, swallowing up his body. He felt very dizzy, tired. Invisible fists pounded the inside of his skull. "_Get out, get out of here, out, now, get out of here now, now, now, get out …_" His feet refused to obey his mind. He watched in horror as they merely stayed there on the floor, blood pulsating on the shoes.

Finally, the right one left the floor, sailed through the air and landed on the floor again, a little closer to the exit. The left one lingered for what felt like several minutes, then followed suit. His head throbbed, his feet moved slowly towards the double doors, the blood creeped up across his waist. It was getting harder and harder to walk.

"_Oh, you're not leaving already, are you? We'll have so much fun together, me and you and the rest of the audience. You've certainly been a most amusing contestant, but now the game is over, I'm afraid._" The host uttered a short mirthless laugh as Matt staggered towards the exit. So close to it now …

His hand reached the handle and he knew it would be locked, he just knew it, but the door swung out and he stumbled into the hallway. He slammed the door back behind him and ran down the dark hall, suddenly feeling less tired, the tons of invisible lead vanishing from his legs and the headache from his head.

When he was back in the elevator, he looked down at his body.

No blood.

He laughed somewhat madly. The noise of the quiz show was gone. He swivelled his neck and pressed the "3" button. The elevator ascended to the third floor and he stepped into yet another dark, deserted hallway, with more dead infants hanging just below the ceiling. Odd, muffled grinding noises appeared to be coming from all around him.

When he entered S9, the size of the room surprised him. Then he saw the other door and realized that S9 and S10 had been combined by removing the wall between them. Rusty grill made up the floor; he could see a Nurse armed with a scalpel strolling around in M5 below him. A white refrigerator was seated on one of the two clammy beds in this room, #S9/10. There were shotgun shells, revolver bullets, two health drinks and a strange reddish container on top of it.

Matt reloaded the revolver and placed the remaining eight revolver bullets in his backpack. He did the same with the shotgun, placing four remaining shells in his pockets. He drank one of the health drinks on the spot and saved the other bottle for later, tucking it into his backpack. Then he examined the small container-like object. It turned out to be an ampoule with some sort of wholesome liquid inside. That would surely come in handy later, so he placed it in his pocket.

Inside the fridge, he discovered nothing but a single ordinary reed and three butterflies. They flew out as soon as he had opened the fridge, three dark shapes fluttering around freely. Disregarding that, he left the reed in the fridge and exited the room to try the other doors in the hallway.

---

They all proved to be shut tight; the locks were broken.

Except the double doors to the office wing at the eastern end of the hallway. They were locked, but could be opened if you knew what four buttons to press and in what order, from amongst the nine digit buttons next to the doors. Since Matt didn't know the code at the moment, he walked away down the hallway.

All of a sudden, he understood it. "_Lord of Serpents and Reeds …_" That was what the 3D hands of the God painting were supposed to be holding, of course. He ran to room S9/10 to get the reed. When he got back, the refrigerator was closed and someone, a woman, was crying.

The sound was coming from inside the fridge.

Was that thing big enough to contain a human being? Or was there something else inside? Clutching the shotgun, he walked up to the bed, gripped the handle and pulled. The body of a human immediately fell out, rolled down from the mattress and landed on the grating.

It was Sophie. There was a hole in the flesh on the front of her body, between the neck and breasts. Someone had shot her there? Blood was still seeping out from the bullet wound … Even though she looked rather dead, Matt still attempted to feel her pulse.

Dead.

He stood and looked down at her pale face. He didn't feel enough for her to cry, he didn't even know her, but how could he remember her name, then?

"_Why can't I remember who you were? Where and when did we meet, and why? Who the hell are you?_" Too many questions …

The reed was still lying inside the fridge. He snatched it, opened the door and left the room. The three butterflies followed him out and fluttered away through the hallway.

---

After backtracking to room M6, he placed the reed in God's left hand and the serpent figurine in her right hand. The painting swung aside, revealing a doorway in the wall behind it. Matt stepped through it, into a dark passage which he followed downwards until he reached a dead end with a typewritten memo on the wall. It was a fairy tale, probably about the code for the 3F doors to the office wing:

**Once upon a time, there were four dragons guarding a beautiful princess in a dark cave in the middle of a mountain. The poor princess could not escape from the cave. She felt very sad and lonely.**

**When the brave and kind prince heard about the princess trapped in the cave inside the mountain, he left his castle and ventured out to save her, but the scaly fire-breathing dragons in the mountain wouldn't let the princess get away. The first dragon had four heads. The second dragon had one head less than the first one. The third dragon had twice as many heads as the first one. The fourth dragon had two heads more than the second one. They were very formidable and horrifying, but the brave prince cut off all their heads with his magic sword. **

**Then he and the princess made their way out of the cave and escaped from the mountain. Back at the castle, they got married and everyone lived happily ever after.**

"Crappy story," he muttered and took the memo with him back to the locked doors on the third floor.

---

"The first dragon had four heads." He pressed 4 … "The second dragon had one head less than the first one." … then 3 … "The third dragon had twice as many heads as the first one." … then 8 … "The fourth dragon had two heads more than the second one." … and lastly, 5.

Unlocked.

---


	13. The Midwife

Chapter 13: The Midwife

Matt pushed the doors open and was about to step out when he noticed that every single square foot of the 3F office wing's floor was gone. In fact, the interior walls, doors, furniture – everything was gone. Only a few of those rubber tubes were left, hanging from the ceiling.

Looking down, he couldn't see anything at the second floor either. Not even the second floor's floor was present. The first floor was lost in darkness, which neither the beam of his flashlight nor his eyes could penetrate.

It looked like someone or something had cleared the office wing of all its contents to make room for … what?

A ladder began at the threshold he was standing on and led straight downwards along the wall until it disappeared in the darkness of the first floor.

"_Well, it's not as if I have a choice_." He turned around and carefully put his feet on the horizontal bars. With his hands clutching the rusty vertical bars, he began the descent.

As he climbed down, Matt saw a number of small naked blood-stained bodies hanging all around him: even more dead babies. Some of them were attached to the walls with huge nails, others were dangling from the ends of the tubes, their heads plugged into the tubes like corks into bottles. Matt would probably have vomited if he hadn't already emptied his stomach back in the 2F rest room.

With a face as white as a sheet, he reached the end of the ladder on the first storey and planted his feet on the tiles of the damp floor.

All the interior walls of the 1F office wing had also vanished, thus joining all the rooms, the hallway and the stairwell. In addition, this was joined with the other two floors into one immense, empty entrance hall.

No, not an entrance hall. An arena. And it wasn't completely empty.

A circle of fifty spikes stuck out from the floor, each one five feet high and with an infant impaled on the point, like butterflies on pins. The circle looked big enough for a truck to park inside. The dark figure of a woman, five feet eight inches tall, stood in the middle with its back to Matt.

"Daryl?"

"_No, it can't be her, can it? No, it's something else …_"

In spite of that sage thought, he walked away from the ladder, towards the circle. "Hello?" he said. The figure remained motionless. It looked like it was holding something. Now that he got closer, he could see it was wearing clothes reminiscent of a nurse's uniform, but it was badly tattered, with large holes ripped in the fabric. Matt stepped between two spikes into the circle.

That proved to be a bad idea.

As the radio started playing static, the figure slowly turned around to face him.

It was holding the small body of a baby, dripping with blood. But the poor infant was still alive – straining his ears, Matt could hear its soft crying. He could also see his or her face and legs move slightly.

The Nurse-like figure itself was far more grotesque. Its features consisted of two eyes and a very strange mouth. The eyes were hidden by the pale eyelids, which seemed to be stitched up with … steel wire? Veins? Matt couldn't make it out. There was obviously some fierce REM going on behind the eyelids. The mouth (or whatever one could call that gross thing) was a vertical crack, stretched out from the middle of the forehead to the chin.

The rest of the body wasn't very different from that of a Nurse's, although the Midwife, which was what Matt had now guessed was standing before him, didn't wear gloves and wasn't armed with anything, yet.

"Holy. Fucking. Shit," he muttered.

Suddenly, the creature raised the baby above its head, walked up to the nearest spike and …

"NO! Don't …"

But Matt wasn't quick enough. Entrails fell from the spike and besmeared the floor's tiles with blood. A brief crimson fountain rose from the baby's chest. The soft crying stopped.

Then, the Midwife's attention returned to Matt, who had rarely, maybe never ever felt so sick before in his entire life. Its mouth broadened, revealing a lack of teeth and a cornucopia of veins stretched out between the "lips", as it let out a distorted cross between an angry scream and an orgasm-like moan. Literally coming out of thin air, menacing orange flames appeared at the spikes all around them, trapping them inside the circle.

Abruptly and with astonishing force, it jumped at Matt and pinned him to the floor. Sitting astride his body, it gripped the shotgun, wrenched it from him and shoved the weapon against his neck. Matt barely managed to thrust the creature off him before it pulled the trigger and the bullets flew up towards the ceiling.

Having missed its target, the Midwife let out another weird roar, stood and started taking aim at Matt. The latter's reflexes kicked in and he pulled the revolver out while hopping sideways in a pathetic attempt to dodge the results of the Midwife's imminent trigger-squeezing. The fire continued to lick the corpses of the babies along the circumference of the circle.

Shots rang out.

Matt fired four times, the Midwife two. The creature reeled, three bullets buried in its hip and thigh. Its opponent was still uninjured.

The Midwife made yet another screaming/moaning noise, leapt over the spikes, the heat blurring its legs for a second, and landed on the floor outside the circle. Matt was relieved; he thought the abomination was retreating, giving up the fight. Obviously, he didn't know how persevering the town of Silent Hill could be.

The monster's feet left the floor and suddenly, it was crawling like an insect along the wall. With awe-inspiring rapidity, it crawled up the walls and disappeared in the darkness two storeys above Matt.

He looked up into the black abyss hanging over him. He knew the pesky monster was sitting somewhere up on the ceiling, watching him. He could feel it staring down at him …

A shot rang out and a bullet cracked the tile next to his right foot. He drew back in surprise, nearly stepping into the flames, heard something land on the floor to his left and saw a movement in the corner of his eye ...

The twisted sniper scrambled to its feet after the fall and immediately fired the shotgun two times in the general direction of its target. Despite the element of surprise, it still didn't succeed in shooting Matt, who managed to get out of the way before the trigger was pulled.

The Midwife then jumped at Matt, pinned him down and shoved the gun against his neck again. Matt couldn't push the demon away this time; his hands were stuck under its knees. Uttering a triumphant roar, it pulled the trigger.

Click.

Click – click – click.

After pulling the trigger four times in vain, the Midwife realized it had run out of ammunition. Annoyed and still bloodthirsty, it struck its victim in the head with the shotgun and tossed it away. Matt let out a cry of pain and continued his futile attempts to pull his hands out from under the freak's knees.

Apparently, the monster now decided to forget about fancy weapons and switch to another plan. Its right hand found his nose and its left hand rested on his throat.

Then, the two hands began to squeeze.

Matt could only lie there and squirm while the life was throttled out of him. His eyes wandered from the ragged uniform to the infants to the floortiles. Slowly, relentlessly, everything began to go black and all kinds of thoughts and feelings flashed through his mind …

His right hand finally escaped from its confinement between the floor and knee, flew up to the nauseating face above him and fired the revolver. The Midwife made one last screaming-and-moaning-at-the-same-time sound and slumped down on him. He pushed the dead body aside and stayed on the floor for a while, taking breath and watching the flames die down until the only light-source in the hall was his flashlight.

With a red hand-shaped mark on the neck and bags under the eyes, Matt eventually stood. Only charred remains of the small dead bodies were left on the spikes and there was still an awful smell of burnt flesh in the stale air.

Remembering the ampoule from room S9/10, he reached into his backpack and pulled the container out. He didn't have much experience with doing jabs on himself, but did pull it off somewhat successfully, injecting the liquid into his arm. It didn't take long before he began to feel the relieving effects kick in.

After a minute of searching the dark hall, he found the shotgun that abomination had thrown away and picked it up. When he had reloaded it with the four shells left in his pocket, Matt decided he might as well leave the hospital. He couldn't see any reason to stay in this godforsaken building. "_Why did I even come here in the first place? … Oh yeah, because of that stupid note I found in the church._"

But when he tried to get back out to Carroll St., he discovered that the lobby doors were locked.

"Crap," he muttered, turned around, his back leaned against the door, and winced when he noticed Tommy standing in the middle of the circle of spikes and charred babies, apparently unaffected by the horrendous sights around him. He still had those bruises and scrapes that had dotted his body back in the coffin and his clothes were blood-stained, but he was standing right there, _alive_.

Oddly enough, a round dark hole, three feet in diameter, had also suddenly appeared out of nowhere in the floor before the kid's feet.

"Tommy? You … How did … I thought you were dead!"

The boy just stood there in the middle of the hall and stared at Matt with the odd combination of dismal eyes and a little enigmatic smile on his face.

"Hello? Is something wrong?" Matt said.

"_What a stupid question,_" he thought, "_of course something's wrong. Everything's wrong in this place. And if you've been killed by a supernatural creature, risen from the dead and gone mute, something is **very, very wrong**_."

"Why won't you say something?" he asked, desperation in his voice.

Abruptly and still smiling, Tommy deliberately hopped forwards and fell into the hole.

"Fuck! Tommy …" Matt ran to the hole and looked down. An empty darkness stared back at him. Why had Tommy had to do that? And where had this stupid gap in the floor come from? It was like a dream, nothing made sense …

The most pertinent question was of course: Did he have the guts to let himself fall down there, too?

The hesitation lasted for a few minutes. A wealth of different ideas and opinions fluttered around in his mind. Eventually, one of the voices broke away from the others and asked him one question:

"_Do you really think you have anything in particular to lose now?_"

When he realized what the true answer was, Matt dropped down into the darkness.

---

A/N: Whew, finally finished this stupid Midwife fight scene. Sorry about it getting all Valtiel-ish, with the wall-scaling … Anyway, honest feedback will as usual be appreciated, and remember to TINW. –E.P.O.


	14. Underground University

Chapter 14: Underground University

"Jenny? What are you doing here … oh no."

Matt opened his eyes and was greeted by the light blue shade of the floor he was lying on after dropping through the hole, following Tommy like Alice following the talking rabbit. Fluorescent tubes were reflected on either side of his head. "_Wow. A spotlessly clean floor. Now there's something you don't see every day in this place._" He slowly stood to take a look at his new surroundings and discovered that he was alone in a small room with white walls and five wooden doors, illuminated by the four tubes on the ceiling, in the middle of which the hole he had entered through was sitting like a huge black spider.

That voice just before … it had sounded like Stu, tired and surprised. "_But who's Jenny?_"

Then he heard Stu talking again: "Oh no, you're not Jenny … shit, get away from me!" His voice trailed off into a scream of pain. It was easy to hear that he was somewhere to the right of Matt.

There were two doors in the right wall of the room. The first one Matt tried opened at once and he tripped into a surprisingly large room, brightly lit by ceiling lamps that were a little dated, although less primitive than the tubes of the previous room. There was a maze of dark chinks and crevices in the ceiling. Various paintings and photos of landscapes and scientists hung on the walls. It looked like a university's lecture room or something, with several benches positioned in a sloping semicircle to face the platform down at the back of the room. There was also a screen for showing slides down there.

But it was empty right now, except for him, Stu and a repulsive new monster. Matt named this one a Doll because of the way it resembled a twisted puppet. It had the naked and blood-smeared body of a young woman, but the arms were missing, replaced by plastic arms, just like those you'd find on a mannequin. These artificial arms had been sloppily stitched together with the torso's flesh with black string in a weak attempt to create the illusion that there was nothing unusual about this body.

An illusion shattered by the two extra, slightly hairy and muscular arms growing out of its back. Its bald, pale head was missing eyes, ears and a nose, although it did have a huge, dislocated, toothless mouth. A transparent sticky liquid covered the body like icing on a cake. Since its legs had been cut off at the knees, it couldn't walk. But three long wires – one attached to its crown with a hook, the other two clutched in the mannequin hands – hung through cracks in the ceiling and kept the body hovering a few feet above the floor. Matt got the feeling there was some weird puppeteer residing above the ceiling, controlling the Doll's movements by pulling the wires around.

Stu was standing at the rostrum and Matt could now see why he was screaming like that: the Doll was embracing him, the arms sticking out of its back wrapped around his torso, its huge mouth gobbling up his head in a grotesque parody of a kiss.

Matt ran down past the benches to save him, but that proved to be unnecessary. Stu managed to free himself from the Doll's hug and thrust the monster away before Matt had reached the scene of the fight. Something above the ceiling (in all probability the mysterious puppeteer) let out an angry roar as Stu raised the knife he had been holding and drove it into the creature's mouth and through the back of its head.

The puppeteer roared one last time and dropped his wires. They fell to the floor along with the Doll's blood-squirting body.

Not until now did Stu notice Matt standing at the lowest row of benches. "You again? What are you doing here?"

"I, uh … I've been checking out the hospital. Then I found this hole and jumped down it, and the next thing I know I'm in an underground university or something, and you're getting attacked by something that belongs in a Clive Barker story … who's Jenny, anyway?"

"Oh, that's just … a girl I knew once, before I ended up in this town. She … I thought I saw her just before, I really thought that was her. But then she … transformed …"

"Into this thing?" Matt asked, pointing to the monster on the floor.

"Yes. I should have known it was just one of the town's tricks. How stupid of me …" Stu turned away, placed his elbows on the rostrum and buried his face in his hands. "I'm so disgusting … a disgusting old bastard …"

Matt wasn't good at consoling people. He only managed to utter an awkward "errr …" and stand there with a somewhat concerned look on his face.

Then Stu turned around and stomped the Doll a few times before he calmed down. "Got any cigarettes?" he asked, fidgeting with his black tie.

"No."

"Dammit."

"Uh … so where did you get that big-ass knife?"

"The Silent Hill Fresh Meats store. I think it was somewhere on Neely Street. Lots of butcher's knives there. If you need a good weapon, you should go there the next time you're in that part of town."

"Thanks, but I think I've already got enough to defend myself with, at the moment."

"Suit yourself."

"So what's with this lecture room? It doesn't make sense at all, that there should be some fancy university situated beneath the hospital …"

"Well, there aren't any universities in this part of the US. This is probably the town materializing my memories of that university I used to work at … It does that a lot."

"So you never know what's real around here?" Matt asked.

"Of course you don't. I thought you'd have figured that out by now. In the beginning, I was confused, too," Stu said and began to walk up to the door Matt had entered through before. "But then I started to understand the … nature of this place. It'll be easier for you if you compare it to a dream."

"A dream?"

"Yes. A jumble of memories and familiar feelings, a seemingly absurd mess. And yet, it's trying to tell you something …"

"Actually … I know what you mean. It does feel like a dream. It's like I'm not really here," Matt said.

Stu turned around, apparently now starting to take an interest in Matt's situation. "Like you're not really here?"

"Yeah, as if my real body is sitting, or lying, somewhere far away from this room, and I'm sleeping, or unconscious or something … It's stupid, right? I'm just really tired …"

"No, I think it might be because you're … Well, you said your plane crashed nearby and you were the only survivor? You got up from your seat, walked around and tried to feel the pulses of the other passengers, and it turned out everyone had died except you?"

"Yes …"

"Maybe that was _too_ lucky for you. Maybe you _did _in fact _…_"

"What? You're mumbling," Matt said.

"Oh, nothing. Let's just get out of here," Stu replied and led the way back into the room with the hole in the ceiling.

The door in south wall was locked, but Stu produced a small key from his pocket and unlocked it. "Where did you get that?" Matt asked.

"Found it on a bench in that lecture room, before you got there," Stu said and opened the door. They stepped into a short hallway with more fluorescent tubes and white walls. For some reason, there were several baby's dummies and broken nursing bottles lying on the floor. A disgusting smell was rising from the floor; the milk that had poured out from the bottles looked much too old.

"Eeew," Stu declared as they walked down the hallway until they reached a dead end with a rectangular black hole in the floor.

"Ugh. Another hole. Do we really have to go down there?" Matt said, staring into the darkness below them.

"Well … all the other doors back there wouldn't open. I guess this is our only way out."

Despite that comment, they hesitated for a while.

"Life is like a deep pit. When you're born, you start falling. When you reach the bottom, you die," Stu said.

"And who said that? Some old philosopher?" Matt asked.

"I don't know. I think I read it in a magazine somewhere … So anyway, we'll jump at the same time, right?"

"Right."

"Okay … on 3, then. 1 … 2 … 3."

Their feet left the floor somewhat simultaneously and they fell into the cold abyss.

---

A/N: Darn, 'twas a short chapter. Oh well. The next one will certainly be longer, TINW. Jake: Yes, I'll probably have to try making a living as a writer when I get older … Wrath: Good, it was supposed to be slightly disturbing. My theory is that the "audience" consists of people like James and Matt who didn't answer correctly and are doomed to spend the rest of their lives stuck in Silent Hill, playing spectators at the quiz shows. Sounds pretty stupid now that I think about it … Karry: Didn't he get the town map somewhere in chapter 2? –E.P.O.


	15. Occurences in the Prison

Chapter 15: Occurences in the Prison

He awoke on a bed that was about as comfortable as a slab of stone. There was a smell of dirt and urine wafting around. The radio was once more crackling. Clanking metallic noises were coming from somewhere above him.

Matt got up to a sitting position, clutched his shotgun, scanned his surroundings. No monsters. No Stu, either.

He got up from the bed, which only consisted of a filthy mattress and an old-looking bedstead. He was in a cramped, rectangular room with the bed, a hole in the ceiling (probably the one he had fallen through), a little yellowish toilet, a wash basin and a shelf filled with magazines. Someone had scratched the words "**eAT**** me**" into the wall. An iron bar-door separated the cell from the dark hallway outside.

Matt pulled the door aside – it made a horrible shrill noise - and stepped out. The hallway continued to his right, with more cells at the south wall. "_What, is this a prison or something?_" To his left, the hallway ended with a single grey door in the wall.

Stepping through that, he ended up in another corridor, going north-south, with water dripping from some broken pipes on the ceiling. Weepers roamed this area, the bandages around their heads drenched in tears, but still refusing to fall off.

There was a large map lying unfolded on a desk at the wall. Matt picked it up and hurried through the nearest door into a deserted cafeteria with pillars and all the tables overturned except one. The double doors in the north wall probably led into the cafeteria's kitchen. The various dishes of this place were written on a green board on the wall – stuff like grilled frankfurters, hot chili and banana pudding. Matt could barely make out the year and month at the top of the board: **MARCH 1956**. "_No wonder this place looks so old._"

He sat down on a bench at the only table still standing on its four legs and studied the map. It seemed he was in the southwestern part of a large one-storey building with a small basement. Two words in the map's upper corner confirmed his suspicion about the purpose of this place: **Toluca**** Prison**.

Throwing away the maps of Carpenter Library and Brookhaven Hospital to make room, he tucked the prison map into his pocket and explored the rest of the cafeteria.

There was a painting of this very room hanging on the wall. It was remarkably well painted, very detailed. It looked a lot like its real counterpart right now, but a corpse, dotted with gunshot wounds, was sitting hunched up at one of the tables, his bloody back turned to those contemplating the picture. In fact, the mysterious body sat on a bench in the lower right corner of the image, exactly where Matt had been sitting a few seconds ago.

As he continued looking at the solitary dead guy in the painting's version of the cafeteria, Matt felt there was something familiar about it. Those pants, that T-shirt, the brown hair …

"Shit!" He drew back when he realized it was _himself _sitting there on the canvas. By instinct, he turned around to look back, but there wasn't anyone else in the real cafeteria, neither living people nor his own corpse.

And when he looked back at the painting, the body in the lower corner was gone. It was just an ordinary old painting of this room.

Dumbfounded, he scratched his neck, remembering what Stu had said about this place. Had there ever really been a dead Matt Hardt look-a-like in that picture? Or was it an idea briefly pulled out of his mind and into reality by these so-called Gods?

Still confused, Matt entered the prison's kitchen. It was narrow and dusty, with a strong smell of old cheese and coffee. Empty soup cans lay scattered on the floor and counters.

Matt searched the drawers and fridges, but only found a meat tenderiser and a strange tablet. The tenderiser was a double-head steel hammer, about 12 inches long. It would surely come in handy as a weapon. He stuffed it into his backpack, then examined the tablet.

It was small, brownish and seemed to be made of metal. There was a childish drawing on one side: A pig, walking on two feet, with a sinister grin on its crude face. Two words were written below it: **Lascivious Bastard**.

Frowning, he placed the tablet in his backpack and left the kitchen. Back in the cafeteria, the painting had changed again. Sophie was now standing in the middle of the canvas, her eyes following the astonished Matt as he staggered through the room to the hallway outside.

---

Drops of water fell from pipes at the ceiling and landed on the floor of the northern cell hallway, making a quiet pattern of dripping sounds, almost like soothing music. In contrast, a few Cerberus were trapped in some of the cells – roaring and screaming, they jumped at the bars and their claws reached out for Matt's flesh as he walked past them. When he found a cell with no monsters inside, he tried to get in, but the doors were usually shut tight.

He did manage to get inside one of the cells at the middle of the hall, though. It was as cramped and cold as all the others. There was a diary lying on the bed – **Charley Abramson** was written on the front cover. Its pages had grown yellow and the handwriting was kind of odd, but Matt could still read it:

**February 16**

**I got locked up in here yesterday. It's really cold. Can't sleep at night.**

**February 17**

**The guard said my execution will take place the day after tomorrow. But what have I done to deserve this? I'm so afraid.**

**February 18**

**The guard just came. He asked me how I want them to "snuff out" my "worthless life". What an idiot! But anyway, I chose hanging. Skewering's more painful, right?**

**I don't get it. I came home from work that day, and there were two … I don't know what to call them. Monsters … with huge red eyes, and claws, running around in my front yard. When they saw me, they tried to attack me! But luckily, there was a shovel lying on the lawn. I snatched it and beat those things up before they got me killed. I can still remember those unearthly laughing sounds they made …**

**February 19**

**There's a weird tablet under my bed. I just discovered it. But it's useless to me, so I'm just going to leave it alone. The guard's coming in a few minutes to take me to the big execution yard, where those guys with the white robes are going to hang me. I guess this is it. Time to say goodbye to the world. I feel so tired. Maybe it**

The diary ended there for some reason. Matt dropped it on the bed and was about to leave the cell when he remembered something he had read in the last entry.** There's a weird tablet under my bed** …

He got down on the floor and looked under the bedstead. Sure enough, there was another metal tablet in there. He reached into the darkness, pulled out the tablet and stood. It was just like the "Lascivious" tablet, although this one was more yellowish and the drawing depicted an angry woman-like figure with bloodshot eyes. **Avenger** was written below her. 

---

"So this is the execution yard, I guess," Matt muttered to himself. He had just entered an immense, dark hall. The ghostly sounds of invisible galloping horses regularly emanated from the darkness around him.

At the middle of the hall, he had discovered a relatively small scaffold with three ropes hanging from it. There was a painting on the front of the base. It depicted a hanged man and two people with weird triangle-shaped heads or helmets ("_executioners?_"). Ten words written above the picture: **I give you blood to atone for the Three Sins**. Three square depressions carved into the stone below the picture struck him as being the exact same size as the tablets from the kitchen and the cell.

Matt produced the "Avenger" from his backpack and placed it in the middle depression. It fitted perfectly! As did the "Lascivious Bastard", which he placed in the left depression.

But he still needed the third one. Thinking that the missing tablet had to be around here somewhere, he turned around and backtracked through the yard.

---

Back in the north-south hallway to the left of the huge yard on the map, he found some typewritten documents on a desk. They seemed to be about the prisoners. Some were here because of serious crimes such as rape and murder, others had merely been shoplifting. There was also something about the guy who wrote that diary:

**Prisoner # C-218**

**Name: Charley Abramson**

**Installed in cell S2-6 on February 15**

**Crime: Was committed on February 14. Abramson murdered his two children, Diane and Mark Abramson, at around ****17:00 P.M.**** According to witnesses, the victims were playing in the front yard of the Abramson house when mr. Abramson came home from work and, for no apparent reason, brutally murdered the victims with a shovel.**

**Execution date and time: February 19 ****11.00 A.M.******

Matt shuddered. Had Charley really seen any monsters, or was that part of his diary just a delusion of his, an attempt to justify his crime?

When Matt noticed what was written below Charley's record, he simultaneously flinched and gasped:

**Prisoner # C-219**

**Name: Matt Hardt**

He couldn't read the rest; the documents were badly stained with black ink. "_Maybe it's just a coincidence. Some prisoner around here's got your name … so what? Forget about it. Just a coincidence,_" an earnest voice in his mind said. Matt chose to heed the voice's advice, even though he knew, deep down, that his name on that paper was anything but a coincidence.

---

 ****

After wandering through a couple of dark hallways, Matt found himself in a small room, divided into two parts by a wooden panel and, above that, a filthy pane of glass. This was probably where the prisoners could go to talk with their visitors. There was an uncomfortable chair on either side and a circle of tiny horizontal chinks in the middle of the pane, so that you could hear what the person on the other side was saying.

Of course, there was no one here now, other than Matt. The third tablet was lying on the chair. It was reddish and just as small as the others. The drawing depicted a man's body with a crow's head and wings. The wings appeared to be reaching out for something. "**Protector**" was written below it.

Matt placed it in his backpack and was about to leave, his hand on the doorknob, when he heard a sound behind him - the sound of another door being opened.

"Hi."

He turned around to see Amanda standing on the other side of the pane. Apparently, she had just entered the visitor's half of the room from the hallway outside. She sat down on the chair opposite Matt and looked at him with a smiling and yet melancholic face, reminiscent of Tommy's just before he had jumped down the hole.

"Uh … hi. So … what happened to you back at the hospital? In room C4? It looked pretty weird," Matt blurted out, sitting down on the chair in his side of the room.

The girl wiped some filth off the pane so she could get a better view of Matt. "Where's Tommy?" she asked.

"I … I don't know. How did you get here, anyway?" Matt said.

The girl just sat there. "You should get back to the scaffold and insert that last tablet," she replied.

"What the … How do you know about that?"

"I know everything you know," Amanda replied. Matt could suddenly sense something was wrong with the girl. There was something ancient behind those innocent eyes. "I know every single thought and memory of yours, every idea and …"

"Amanda, stop that. You're scaring me."

"Oh really? Am I? Well … sorry about that." Her voice had an almost scornful tone.

"Err, it's okay," Matt said. "Anyway, do you know this woman named Sophie? She's …"

Amanda suddenly stood and started to walk away.

"Hey, where are you going? Don't leave me here!" Not getting any answers, Matt got up and pounded the pane. "Goddammit, are you deaf? Amanda, stop …"                                                                            

The kid left the room and closed the door behind her.

"Ferfucksake, what is the fucking DEAL with that girl?" he said, kicking the chair in frustration.

Then he remembered the short hallway to the north of this room. If he went through that, he'd get to the visitor's part of the building, where Amanda had gone …

He bolted out to the hallway, turned left, ran up the hall to the next door in the left wall and grabbed the knob.

Locked.

"Dammit," he muttered and stepped back. Remembering that undying action-movie cliché, he tried kicking the door open. Of course it didn't work. He tried throwing his body against the door, too, but it only resulted in a sore right shoulder and even more verbal streams of blasphemy.

Amanda was gone, and there was nothing he could do about it. All alone in jail again …

---

Back in the yard, Matt inserted the "Protector" in the last depression.

Nothing happened.

He turned around to lean against the base of the scaffold and drove a hand through his hair. "_Well, what had you expected? Some big miracle, just because you placed all three tablets here?"_ He let out a disappointed sigh.

Suddenly, flickering orange light seemed to be coming from somewhere just behind him. The light of flames? Matt didn't have time to turn around and take a look at the source before a gloved hand grabbed his t-shirt and yanked him up onto the scaffold.

It was Amamet. The light was coming from his fiery sword, which was now piercing his head through the back, sticking out where his upper lip would have been if he had an ordinary face. But this time, the angel didn't need or want to use the two-edged sword. He merely grabbed the right rope and slung it around Matt's neck.

The wooden trapdoor dropped and Matt fell down a few feet until the rope stopped him and the noose tightened, squeezing his throat. There wasn't a floor under the scaffold. His feet dangled above a black pit.

Amamet just stood there, staring at his victim. "_Tceruser__ hturt,_" the childrens' voices chanted. Matt looked imploringly back at the being while everything began to go black.

Then, rather abruptly, Amamet once more pulled the sword out from his head and used it to cut the rope three feet above Matt's scalp. As he fell into darkness and unconsciousness again, he could barely hear the voices chant something like "_Ereht__ saw on gnitcetorp …_"

---

Matt awoke on a strange damp rock-floor. He scrambled to his feet to discover that he was in a dark cavern of sorts. "_Jeez, if I fall through any more holes, I swear I'm going to end up at the Earth's core._" Moths fluttered around amongst the stalactites at the ceiling. There were crude images drawn on the walls with some sort of faded paint – mostly stick figures hunting the animals of the prairie. "_I did read somewhere that there were Native Americans in this part of the __US__. Maybe this is where they used to live? …_"

The encounter with Amamet back in the execution yard seemed like a bad dream now, but the rope from the scaffold was still hanging loosely around his neck. There was only one way forwards. Too tired to bother getting rid of the rope ("_well, it does have a certain sentimental value, doesn't it?_"), he started wandering through the cave.

---

A/N: Don't worry, Shortey, Matt's "twisted story" will be revealed. For the time being, I'm trying to kill you all with the suspense ... TINW, –E.P.O.   


	16. Haunted

Chapter 16: Haunted

Further on in the Indian cave, Amamet started to pop up in the wall paintings. Some of the pictures depicted him flying above rainbows, with huge, brown feather-wings, like those of an eagle, instead of the tattered pieces of skin Matt had seen. His face was also different – it had a crude nose, a smiling mouth, black eyes. In one painting, he was riding on a white horse, the burning sword sticking out from his mouth.

The symbol from the suitcase in the plane was drawn on the walls and ceiling. A red triangle inside two red circles. What could it mean? "_I'll bet this was a sacred area to them._"

Of course it was. This whole town and the surrounding area was holy to the Indians who had lived around here – that's what it had said in the Lost Memories book at the library. "_I wonder why? Did those Indians believe in these "Gods", or "Silent Spirits" or whatever?_"

The moths continued fluttering around their stalactites. There were horizontal recesses in the walls where skeletons of the Native Americans were lying, holding various talismans and amulets. Some of them wore fairly flamboyant headgears, too – they were probably priests or war-heroes or something.

"_I guess this was their cemetery,_" Matt mused.

He soon reached the other end of the cavern. For some reason, there was a rusty ladder on the wall leading up through the ceiling. Standing on the ground and looking up, it was impossible to see where it ended.

Nevertheless, Matt began the ascent; he didn't want to stay in that creepy graveyard anymore.

However, climbing up the ladder proved to be quite difficult. Firstly, it wasn't like the one in the hospital's office wing – this time, he had to climb upwards. And it was a long trip. As if that wasn't enough, the bars were wet and slippery.

After an aeon of climbing up the shaft, he could finally see the top of the ladder. Over that, the edge of a round hole, and above that, the black starless night sky. When the first breeze from above brushed against his face, he immediately started climbing faster.

A couple of minutes later, Matt pulled himself out of the shaft and onto the floor-grating of the first outdoor area he had visited since Carroll Street. Yellowish smoke – or was it just fog? – was floating lazily around in the warm air. There was a strange high structure to his left – "_a rollercoaster?_"

"So you found a way out of the prison, huh?" Amanda said. She was sitting to his right, on top of a wagon of sorts. It looked like it was supposed to sell popcorn, but there was of course neither clerks nor customers around. The popcorn itself didn't exactly look appetizing.

"Um, yeah. And how did you get out here? It's like you show up everywhere I go," Matt said and stood.

"It's a long story," Amanda replied and jumped down from the wagon.

"But why did you just walk away like that in the prison? It was … well, rude. And a little creepy."

"Sorry. I had to go to the bathroom."

"You could at least have told me that instead of just suddenly walking away. God, everyone I've met in this town, there's just something weird about all of you … Anyway, back in the prison I asked you if you knew this woman named Sophie. She's blonde, snub-nose, looks a few years younger than me … Well?"

"Nope, never heard of her," Amanda replied.

"Okay … So do you know where we are? It looks like an amusement park …"

"Yes, it's the only one in town. Lakeside Amusement Park. The Mountain Coaster's right there," Amanda pointed to the high structure behind Matt, then to the building to his left, "and there's the haunted mansion."

"Sounds like you know this place."

"Yeah, well, I've been here before," Amanda explained and started walking towards the mansion. "**Borley****Haunted****Mansion**" was written on a sign above the wooden door.

"You wanna go through the haunted mansion?" Matt said.

"Yeah. I think they're funny," Amanda said. "What's the matter?"

"I've got a bad feeling about it."

Amanda giggled. "You're not afraid of ghosts, are you?"

---

"Welcome to the Borley Haunted Mansion!" a man's voice emitted by some hidden speaker said when they set foot in the entrance hall. It was a large square room with a high ceiling and two doors – the one they had entered through and another one in the left wall.

"We're so glad you came. Please come inside and look around. When you feel you're ready, then go through the door," the voice continued.

Matt strolled up to the door in the left wall and opened it. Followed by Amanda, he stepped through. They walked up a narrow staircase with dusty portraits hanging on the walls. "You might want to be careful around here. The ceiling can sometimes collapse when you least expect it," the slow voice admonished. Of course, Matt and Amanda didn't really believe that – it was just something that guy said to scare them, right?

"What's that smell?" Matt asked.

"Dunno," Amanda replied and shrugged.

Then, suddenly, it happened. First, Matt heard the crumbling sound. A second later, Amanda's high-pitched shriek reached his ears. By the time he had turned around, the girl was gone, and only a hole in the stairs where she had been standing was left.

"Whoops! It seems the floor gave way. That happens a lot in this old building," the voice explained, "I hope you didn't lose anything valuable in the process."

Matt thought about dropping down there. After all, he had survived the trips from the hospital to the university, from the university to the prison and from the execution yard to the caverns. But there was something different about this pit. Somehow, it really appeared to be bottomless.

"You're not thinking about going down there just because of Amanda?" the voice said, as if it had read his thoughts. "There's nothing down there. _Nothing.__ At. All … _I wouldn't do it if I were you."

Matt chose to heed this advice and continued up the stairway. He couldn't mourn for Amanda – the whole situation felt too unreal and dream-like.

At the top of the stairs, he opened another wooden door and entered a small room divided into two by a rusty, three feet high fence. On his side, there was nothing interesting – just a short path to the door in the opposite wall. All the furniture was exhibited on the other side. It looked like a kitchen, with a stove, fridge, counters and closed white cupboards fastened to the walls and ceiling above the counters. The cupboards had padlocks on them for some reason. "_Why would anyone want to bother locking their kitchen cupboards?_" Matt mused and started walking across the creaking floor to the next door.

"This is the mansion's second floor kitchen," the voice informed. "It is rumoured that, when mrs. Maybrick lived here with her two daughters, she would lock them up in the cupboards whenever they did something ill-bred. It is also rumoured that everyone forgot about the daughters after mrs. Maybrick died in a car accident a few years ago, and the two girls were never heard of again …"

Matt reached the door. The moment he touched the handle, he heard a loud banging noise behind him. Looking over his shoulder, he saw a few small drops of blood seep out from the bottom of one of the cupboards and land on the counter below.

The next room was probably a study. The desk in the corner was made of smooth black wood. Only a few empty envelopes and stamps were lying on it. The mirror hanging on the wall above the desk was cracked and a short message was written on it with almost illegible black letters: **We are all tired of it now.**

The slow voice returned: "Yes, I am sorry it was such a short tour you got."

Matt suddenly saw a quick movement in the mirror and felt a cold gloved hand grab his neck, then the horrible pricking sensation of the needle penetrating his skin …

"We really don't usually want these things sneaking up on our visitors."

Staring at the mirror, he could see the Nurse standing behind him, jabbing the syringe into his neck, injecting a mysterious white liquid. "_White Claudia?_"

"But this time, I'm afraid it was … how shall I put it … _necessary_," the voice continued while the white liquid ventured out of the syringe and into Matt's veins.

He struggled to escape from the Nurse's grip, and under "normal" circumstances, he probably would have been able to do that. After all, the Nurses weren't exactly the most powerful creatures around here. But now, a heavy torpor was overwhelming him and he could barely stand on his two feet anymore. Beads of perspiration fell into his eyes, a somewhat pleasant chill ran from his forehead to his toes and darkness devoured his vision.

---

_Truth may seem, but cannot be;_

_Beauty brag, but 't is not she;_

_Truth and beauty buried be._

When he woke up, Matt was sitting hunched up in a wheelchair. He tried to get up, but his legs refused to cooperate. He was paralyzed. The only parts of his body he could move were his eyes and toes. "_Must be because of the drug that Nurse gave me.__ Shit, shit, shit …_"

He was sitting at the one end of a dark hallway. C1 was written on the door to his left and C2 on a door next to that.

"_So I'm back in the hospital's first floor patient wing. Great._"

Suddenly, the wheelchair started moving. Someone was pushing it down the hallway – or was the wheelchair moving on its own? It didn't matter.

When the chair reached room C4, the door was already open. Matt was pushed inside and parked in the middle of the room in front of the white screen on the wall. In the corner of his eye, he could see the old-fashioned projector was still there to his left.

Familiar footsteps echoed behind him; Amamet had just entered the room. The being walked up to the projector and placed a movie reel on it. Soon, flickering black-and-white images appeared on the screen. "_What the hell? He wants to show me a silent movie?_"

In the beginning, the images were blurred and indistinguishable. But then, they began to get sharper.

Matt could make out a hallway. White walls, grey doors, a floor with black and grey tiles. Despite the lack of colours in the film, he knew where this was – it was an apartment building in L.A. He had been there before.

A figure appeared on the screen. It had grey pants, a black t-shirt and grey hair. "_That's me._" The black-and-white Matt walked down the hallway until he stopped in front of door 515 and knocked. The paralyzed Matt now noticed that the black-and-white Matt was holding a black revolver.

The same revolver the Doctors were armed with.

Memories began to pop up in his head. Room 515 – that's where Sophie had been living after they …

The grey door was opened by Sophie. Her hair in the movie was milk-white instead of blonde. Frowning, she said something the paralyzed Matt could only hear in his mind ("_Matt? What are you doing here? I thought you …_")

The black-and-white Matt raised the revolver. A shot rang out in the paralyzed Matt's mind and a wound appeared between Sophie's neck and breasts. She died instantly. Black blood oozed from the hole and she slumped down, landing on the threshold between the hallway and her apartment.

Silence.

The black-and-white Matt drew back in horror, realizing what he had done. He bumped into the wall and dropped the revolver. It landed on a tile and made a quiet clicking sound he would never forget. With a face so pale it would still look white as a sheet if this was a colour film, he ran down the hallway until his blurred figure disappeared from the camera angle and the movie stopped.

Amamet took his reel and left the room.

Matt could only sit there. When the tears began to trickle down, he couldn't even raise his hand to wipe them off. He had rarely felt more pathetic and miserable before in his life.

All the memories he had repressed and replaced when he got on that plane in the L.A. airport were coming back to haunt him. How he had met Sophie at a library, and how the wedding had taken place about a year later. How they had decided to christen their two children Amanda and Tommy. How Sophie had starting drinking, and occasionally beating the kids. How they had gotten divorced and how obvious it had been that she was going to get the custody, with all those lawyers defending her and hinting that Matt was the one who had been beating their children.

That's why he had gotten on the plane to South Ashfield after murdering Sophie. He thought he could forget, escape and start a new normal life – and maybe he could have done that if the town of Silent Hill hadn't pulled him into its twisted realm. Of course he had never had any relatives to visit in South Ashfield. It was just a lie he had made himself believe to "replace the unpleasant truth", as it had said back in Neely's Bar.

Like so many other lost souls trapped in the town, Matt had committed his sin because he had thought it was the right thing to do. He thought it was the only way to protect Amanda and Tommy – maybe he was right, maybe it was just another delusion. The drawing on the "Protector" tablet in the prison had naturally reflected this self-concept. After all, he had recently read that the crow was a Japanese symbol of family love.

---

After what might only have been a few minutes, but had felt like two hours, Matt could move his legs once more. It seemed the effects of the White Claudia had worn off, although he did still feel a little dizzy when he got up from the wheelchair and left room C4.

His footsteps echoed throughout the silent hallway as he walked towards the office wing. There were two white cards lying on a bench at the wall to his left. They were reminiscent of the cards from the sin puzzle in the library. However, the words written on these cards were cardinal virtues: "**Fortitude**" and "**Prudence**". Matt tucked them into his pockets and proceeded down the hallway. He soon reached the other end and went through the double doors in the left wall, into the area where he had fought the Midwife.

It had changed. Again. The floor was gone and replaced by the calm surface of a dark indoor lake. Only the doctor's lounge floor was left, like a small island in the black water. Another bridge of strange, slippery flesh led from the door Matt entered through to the island in the middle of the hall. All the furniture was gone, too, except four small, closed fridges seated at the edge of the island. Daryl was standing on the island with her back turned to Matt, almost like the Midwife before the fight. She was saying something under her breath.

Matt hurried across the bridge, luckily not tripping and falling into the ominous waters. "Daryl?" he said when he set foot on the tiles of the doctor's lounge floor.

"WHAT?" she yelled and turned around. "What are you doing here?" She looked as angry as the lady drawn on the "Avenger" tablet.

Matt now noticed Stu lying on his back at the corner of the island next to the row of fridges. He looked terrible, with lots of bruises and a face that seemed to say "just kill me already".

The waters around them began to move.

"What the … Did you do this to him?" Matt asked the young woman.

"None of your business," Daryl said.

Waves started rolling around in an asymmetrical pattern on the water surface.

"But …"

"Shut up. Nothing you can say is going to change my mind," Daryl said and turned back to face Stu. She was holding her handgun.

"What are you talking about?" Matt said.

"I'm talking about justice." Her voice was full of hatred and loathing.

The waters were stirred up now, as if they were on a ship at sea, trapped in a storm. "Do you know what this guy did to my sister?" Daryl said, "to Jenny? I know. And I won't let him get away with it."

Matt's radio started to play static again.

Daryl's finger tightened on the trigger as she aimed for Stu's head. Before he could do anything to prevent the murder, Matt was washed away by a large wave that suddenly swept across his side of the island. He fell into the warm waters. Currents began tugging at the body that had just entered their territory.

Matt's head rose to the surface just in time for him to see the bullet plunge into Stu's forehead.

When the first drop of Stu's blood trickled beyond the edge of the floor and into the water, all the fridges opened at once and four skinny human-like monsters jumped out. Their legs were bent backwards in a very sickening way and their skin was bluish and gleamy - Matt didn't have much time to absorb the details. They threw themselves against Daryl, moving almost like deformed frogs, and tried gnawing at her legs. She screamed in panic, stumbled back, firing her handgun wildly …

"_Now she can see them, too,_" Matt thought just before a strong current pulled him down into the depths of the waters beneath the hospital.

---

The four creatures were already dead when Daryl fired the last two bullets left in the weapon, still screaming. She continued squeezing the trigger. Click, click, click.

The gun fell from her hand and landed on the floor. Her gaze slowly moved from the empty fridges to the dead monsters to the blood seeping out from Stu's head.

"_Oh my God._"

"I'm … I … it wasn't …"

She turned around, closed her eyes, collapsed, opened her mouth wide and vomited. Sirens could be heard in the distance.

---

Matt awoke on the west shore of Toluca Lake. His clothes were soaked and his mind exhausted. He stood and glanced at the waters. The white mist hung low above the small waves; he was back in the foggy version of the town. "_Everything looks so peaceful …_"

After half a minute of wandering through the quiet forest, he reached Nathan Avenue and followed it to the north, towards the residential area. A butterfly fluttered around the trees to his left for a while, before it disappeared in the mist.

---

A/N: TINW … Whew, I think that was the longest chapter so far! I promise Matt won't lose consciousness or jump down a single hole again in future chapters. -E.P.O.


	17. Virtues

Chapter 17: Virtues

The two-storey building with the blue walls and round windows at the left side of the road was so small it could be mistaken for an ordinary home, but a sign above the entrance revealed that this was Stepford Day Care Center. Matt had reached it after footing it north on Nathan Avenue for about five minutes.

He walked up the small flight of stone steps to the double doors with peeling white paint and stepped inside.

The floor was covered by a milk-white rug. He was in a short hallway that opened into a large room farther on. Small children's raincoats hung on hooks on the right wall. There were still little drops of water on the coats, as if they had been outside in rainy weather just a few minutes ago.

There was a door in the left wall, "**OFFICE**" written on the plate. Matt stepped into the room to have a look around. It was narrow and depressing, with a few pamphlets for the day care center placed on the desk. There was another virtue card lying amongst them, "**Charity**" written on it.

After slipping the card into his pocket, Matt left the office and tried the doors to the children's toilet and employee's cloakroom in the other wall, but they were locked. He then proceeded down the hallway to a large room with toys scattered on the floor. Boxes with dolls (not the monsters, just ordinary dolls) were lined up at the wall.

Matt walked across the room carefully, trying not to step on the toy-cars and plastic-babies resting on the rug.

There were eight completely out of place paintings hanging in a straight horizontal line on the south wall. Like the paintings in the library's Otherworld exhibition hall, they looked very old, like they could have been made in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. "_But why the hell would there be works of art like these in a day care center?_"

Seven of the pictures depicted various virtues, while the painting at the middle, which was twice as high as the others, depicted the familiar lady with the red gown. Of course, the caption read "**God**". The other paintings (there were three to the God's right and four to Her left) had rectangular indentations in the bottoms of their frames, where their captions were obviously supposed to be seated.

"_So I have to solve another puzzle like the one at the library, except this time it's about virtues. That's really fucking splendid. But I've only got three cards … oh well, the rest must be around here somewhere,_" Matt mused.

A spiral staircase at the west wall led to the second floor, but Matt would rather check out the rest of the floor he was already on before going up there.

He walked through a doorway to the left of the stairs into a room with a huge, open, rectangular chest placed in the southeast part. It was made of smooth wood and contained lots of coloured plastic balls. A sloping black tube protruded from the north wall a few inches above Matt's head and ended just above the sea of plastic balls. It was obviously a small slide for the children, probably beginning in some room on the second floor. Matt remembered how he had loved these rides back when he was a kid, too.

The three windows in the west wall offered a boring view of the forest outside and the paintings hanging between them were pretty vacuous. There really wasn't anything interesting in the room, except the door in the south wall. "**The Only Door that lEAds To Holy redemption**" was written on it in blood. Matt grabbed the knob, turned it, pulled and pushed, only to come to the conclusion that the door was either locked or barricaded on the other side.

He turned around and noticed another card lying on a windowsill. This caption read "**Faith**". He added it to the collection of virtue cards in his pocket and then left the room to go up to the second floor.

The spiral staircase ended in a large room with a small plastic seesaw, three tables and six benches. This was probably where the kids and employees could eat their lunch. 

Matt stepped through a doorway and entered a small room in the north-west corner of this floor. Curtains decorated with lots of dancing pink rabbits prevented the light from seeping in through the windows. There was a round hole in the south wall where the black chute leading down to the pool of coloured balls started.

Matt pulled the curtains aside to discover a "**Hope**" card that had been hidden on the windowsill and an odd symbol, three circles inside two bigger ones, scratched into the pane.

With hope resting in his pocket amongst the other four virtues, he walked across the dining room to the employees' toilets. The two tiny rooms were situated in the south-east corner, opposite the room where the slide began.

He stepped into the men's room first. It was cramped and smelled like – surprisingly enough – old cheese. There was nothing interesting there, so he moved on to the ladies' room, where another horribly misspelled message was scrawled down on the mirror:

**the**** end of the jurney whill take plaice in Robbie's Circus in the amyusement park. until than, remember yur monsters purpose that is almost no longer nesessary**

"_Robbie's Circus?__ The end of the journey? What the hell's that supposed to …_"

Interrupting his thought, a Doll was suddenly lowered behind Matt. Apparently, it had been lurking at the ceiling for a while, the puppeteer waiting for the right moment to attack.

Matt saw it in the mirror, turned around and fired his shotgun before the creature embraced him. The puppeteer let out a sad sigh, dropped its strings and, judging by the footsteps that came from somewhere above the ceiling, slowly shuffled away.

"_Well, this place is just full of pleasant surprises, isn't it?_" Matt thought, glancing at his hair in the mirror to check if recent events had caused any unwelcome colours to emerge. He then ran his eyes over the dead body of the Doll. The two last caption-cards were lying on the grimy floor next to its distorted head – he was sure the cards hadn't been there when he first entered the room. Maybe the puppeteer had dropped them through the ceiling's cracks along with the strings when it gave up the fight?

The words "**Justice**" and "**Temperance**" were written on these cards. Matt picked them up and slipped them into his pocket. "_Now I just need to get back down to the paintings and solve the puzzle …_"

A thick leather bound book was lying on one of the tables when he entered the dining room again. It looked like an encyclopedia or something, opened at some pages about swords:

**… of exceptional virtue and strength, spiritual and physical. In art, the sword is the attribute of justice and wrath personified – and of ****St Paul**** who called the word of God "the sword of the spirit". **

**The two-edged sword is specifically a symbol of divine wisdom or truth, notably in Revelation where it protrudes from the mouth of Christ (****1:16****). Buddhism, too, uses the sword as an emblem of wisdom cutting through ignorance, and the Hindu god Vishnu is shown with a flaming sword of knowledge. **

**The flame-like shape of the two-edged sword also links it with purification. Purity is implied by the biblical cherubim who, with a flaming sword, guard the way back to ****Eden**** (Genesis ****3:24****) …**

"I'm just wasting my time reading this," Matt muttered to himself and backtracked to the row of paintings on the first floor.

He began with the painting at the far left. It depicted a young woman pouring water from one stone pitcher into another. Matt was bewildered for a few seconds – then he realized what she was probably doing: "_Diluting wine …_" He inserted the "**Temperance**" card in the indentation in the bottom of the frame and continued to the next picture.

Another young woman was standing at the middle of the canvas, holding an oval gilded mirror out in front of her and staring at her reflection. Serpents slithered around her feet. First, Matt thought this was a depiction of vanity and narcissism, but he soon understood it had to be symbolizing self-knowledge and wisdom and placed "**Prudence**" in the indentation.

The last painting to God's right showed a woman carrying a basket of flowers. A small model of a ship was placed on her head like a big, clumsy hat, and a black chain was hanging from it, with an anchor at its end, resting next to her feet. Matt inserted "**Hope**" below her.

The first painting to the God's left depicted yet another young woman, holding a chalice to her lips with her right hand and a silver cross clutched in her left, standing inside a circle of lit candles. Matt inserted "**Faith**" at this image.

The next one depicted a smiling woman holding two baskets filled with fish and bread out to the pale, skinny people surrounding her. Not hesitating for a second, Matt placed "**Charity**" as the caption.

Last but one, the next painting showed a woman wearing only a gold helmet and shield, forcing a huge lion's jaws apart with her bare hands. "This is getting easy," Matt mumbled and put in the "**Fortitude**" caption.

The last picture was the classic symbol of justice: a blindfolded woman holding scales in one hand and a sword in the other.

After Matt had inserted the last caption, the big rectangular part of the wall with the God painting silently swung back. He stepped through the narrow opening and into a dark corridor.

---

A/N: Short and boring chapter, I know, but I think it made a nice contrast to the bunch of plot revelations that was chapter 16. Kenshul: What's wrong with the haunted mansion? He he, it's one of my favorite parts of SH3. Shortey: Well, I don't think I'm that good with drama and tragedy, but there might be little flashbacks in future chapters. Anyway, the monsters and weird events themselves are like twisted versions of Matt's memories … Oh, and I –so- ripped off "Symbols and their meanings" by Jack Tresidder for the part where Matt read about swords' symbolism. It did show Amamet in a somewhat new light, though, don't you think? TINW, -E.P.O.


	18. Decrepit Reality

Chapter 18: Decrepit Reality

Matt followed the hallway as it led him away from the safety and silence of the day care center. Sirens could be heard wailing somewhere on the other sides of the grey walls, on which photos of Matt's past were hanging, surrounding him, reminding him.

There were photos of Sophie reeling with a green half-empty bottle in her hand. Photos of himself sitting in the courtroom as it was slowly and relentlessly decided who should have the custody. Photos of Amanda sitting in a corner, crying and praying.

The sirens grew louder. "_It's changing again. The town's changing …_"

The walls were now completely covered in photos. Even the ceiling was filled with pictures of the couple on their first vacation in Silent Hill before they had even talked about having children, the elderly female judge sitting in the court, the smiling midwife after Tommy's birth.

Matt finally reached a wooden door at the end of the corridor, turned the knob and stepped through to …

The room with the pool of plastic balls.

He glanced at the other side of the door. "**The Only Door that lEAds To Holy redemption**" was indeed written on it. "_But the hallway went straight forwards – I can't be back in the day care center …_"

He winced when he saw the plastic balls to his left move. He stood still and stared intently at the spot where he thought the strange movement had occurred.

It happened again: the coloured balls rose slightly and the bulge quickly slid across the surface of the plastic sea, towards Matt. A kid's muffled laughter came from somewhere beneath, but in a place like this, it was hardly innocent children crawling around on the bottom.

Matt drew back and hugged the wall. The pool replied with more waves rolling fiercely around, showing that whatever was hiding down there was alive and kicking. Plastic balls flew over the edges of the wooden chest, landing on the rug, and there was also something else falling out along with the plastic balls, a red liquid …

"_Only about ten feet to the exit.__ If you run, you can get out of here in a few seconds,_" a hopeful voice whispered in Matt's head.

He took a deep breath, then dashed for the doorway. Several little blood-smeared arms immediately emerged from between the plastic balls and reached out for him. Some of them managed to catch hold of his clothes and started tugging at them. He quickly broke away from the pale wet hands and sprinted onwards.

But when he reached the corner of the wooden chest and turned right, his feet slid on the plastic balls lying on the floor and he lost balance. He let out a short scream as the back of his head hit the chest's edge and the icy terror was momentarily replaced by red-hot pain.

The cold hands didn't waste any time – before his torso fell to the floor, they seized his head and pulled it up over the edge, down between the plastic balls and into the warm crimson sea hidden below. It didn't matter how much he squirmed and struggled; all the little fingers still kept squeezing his head and pulling him down. He heard hundreds of children laughing and whispering.

"_Good night, dad …_"

With his neck painfully bent back and his legs kicking the wall in utter futility, Matt tried the only solution he could come up with.

His right hand was still clutching the shotgun.

He lifted it up and clumsily shoved the barrels down through the layer of plastic balls behind his head.

"_Daddy?_"

He squeezed the trigger. Bullets plunged into the blood and the whispering children's voices turned into wrathful, unearthly screams. The hands released Matt and withdrew into the depths. He rose from the pool, filled his lungs with the acrid air and scrambled to his feet.

More arms were already bursting up through the plastic balls and eagerly stretching out for their prey. Matt ran past the twitching fingers and through the doorway to the room where he had solved the virtue puzzle.

It had changed, too. The paintings were gone and only an ordinary empty wall was left. The toys were all torn apart, the cars smashed and the dolls decapitated. The coathooks on the wall opposite the office had turned into large rusty iron hooks with mangled children's corpses hanging from them. The hooks had simply been driven straight through the backs of the skulls and into the brains …

"It's just the town's tricks. It's all a dream," Matt muttered to himself and walked through the room. Behind him, he could hear the creatures in the pool swimming slowly around and pushing a few balls over the edges. They had calmed down now that their prey was gone. Apparently, they were too lazy or just somehow unable to get up and chase him.

Matt stepped outside into the warm night and wasn't really shocked to see that Nathan Avenue had been replaced by metal net-grating suspended above bottomless darkness. This darkness was surrounding him on all sides – beneath him, around him, above him on the starless sky. It seemed he was utterly alone in the universe with the road made of metal net and the Stepford Day Care Center building, floating around in endless black emptiness.

"_Well, looks like I'm not _utterly _alone._"

Matt noticed his trusty companion throughout this journey into Hell, Amamet, hovering at the middle of the road in front of him. The angel held the burning sword out to Matt's left, pointing to the north – almost as if showing the sinner which way to go now.

He walked down the stairs and onto the road. It rocked slightly and made a strident, wailing noise.

Amamet suddenly flew off in the direction he had been pointing out with the sword. Matt didn't have any other choice – he ran after the guiding light and followed it past Nathan Avenue, up Sandford Street.

The heat was almost unbearable, and yet the ominous sky was shedding snow. The sensation of the cold snowflakes landing on his shoulders and waves of hellish heat rising from the depths beneath Sandford Street at the same time made him feel sick.

"_So this is what it looks like when one's reality literally falls apart._"

Matt's eyes smarted and a headache once more started growing behind the back of his skull. Dizzy and exhausted, he forgot all about following Amamet any further up Sandford St. as he went from sprinting energetically to staggering at a snail's pace.

"_Might as well give up. I'll never get out of here,_" he thought, slumping down to his knees and staring down through the holes in the net at the pure nothingness. A moth fluttered around his head twice before it decided to take a break and sit on his ear.

Then he noticed the small photo lying there on the road. He had taken it himself about a year ago, when they were all on holiday in the town – him, Sophie and the kids. It was just a tiny snapshot of Tommy and Amanda riding in the teacups in the amusement park.

He slowly looked up to his right. There it was, a huge sign decorated with a clown's cheerful face in the upper corner: "**LAKESIDE****AMUSEMENT PARK**** – FUN DAYS FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY!**" And below the sign, the old gates waited for him to push one of them open and enter the park.

Matt got up and felt the otherworldly energy return, a warm rush flowing from his heels to his fingertips to his head. The moth left his ear and fluttered into the sky. He looked at the simple happiness on his real children's faces in the photo one last time, then he ran into the park.

A pink rabbit costume with a big smile on its blood-smeared mouth greeted him. It was sitting relaxed on a bench to his right. Matt ignored it and went onwards through a wooden gate with "**Souvenir Avenue**" written on the sign above.

Not really sure why he was in such a hurry, he ran down the avenue, his shoes rhythmically pounding the rusty metal under them. There were restaurants and shops lined up to his right, a huge black pit to his left, and in the area between several Dolls floating around with their strings going up into the night sky where ancient Gods were undoubtedly having fun controlling the abominations.

Matt burst into a random souvenir shop and closed the doors behind him. A few blood-thirsty Dolls slammed into the doors on the other side, but he was safe from them at the moment. "_Good thing those morons can't use doorhandles._"

A lonely Cerberus that had been ripping up a rabbit doll at the back of the room suddenly noticed Matt and rushed across the shop to him. Matt raised the shotgun and fired. All three rudimentary heads howled in pain as the bullets sent the monstrosity flying back until it hit the counter.

Matt ran past the shelves with toys and candy, grabbed the cash register from the counter and dropped it on the dog. The radio stopped crackling.

Matt was out of breath, but he couldn't stop now. He was so close, he could feel it, so close to the exit …

There were two doors he could go through to get out of this shop, one in the middle of the right wall and another in the corner at the back. He chose the one in the middle of the wall, simply because it was the nearest, and went out to a large area divided by a metal net-fence to his right.

A ferris wheel spun slowly around on the other side of the fence. A few of those rabbit costumes sat in it, their wide smiles implying that they were enjoying the ride. There was a large building to his left with the words "**Huey's Hullabaloo House**" and a grinning horse's head painted on the sign above the double doors.

Matt ran towards the entrance, but stopped when he heard a familiar voice to his right: "Where are you going?"

Daryl was standing on the other side of the fence, her fingers holding the wires on either side of her head. Her clothes were torn and spattered with blood. Her wet hair clung to her face, partially concealing her bloodshot eyes. Bruises and gashes were visible through some of the holes in her clothes.

Matt walked up to the fence, frowning. "I … what happened to you?"

"The monsters," she mumbled.

"You can see them, too, now?"

"Yes. I guess you were right. They really do exist. I just couldn't see them at first … Oh God, I'm sorry about trapping you in the cafeteria. You sounded so afraid …"

"Yeah, well, it was the first time I saw a Cerberus," Matt explained.

"A Cerberus?" Daryl said.

"That's what I call them. They move like dogs and they've got three heads."

"Okay, I get it. Anyway, I'm really sorry about that. I thought that maybe you were insane and you'd start thinking _I_ were a monster." She cocked her eye at the rabbits in the ferris wheel and the feeble ghost of a wry smile slid across her face. "Maybe you _are_ insane. We're both insane and the monsters aren't really "monsters", just …"

"No, don't think that way. They're real," Matt insisted, although he couldn't help remembering what he had read about Charley Abramson in the prison.

"Okay. Err, what's with the rope?" Daryl asked, noticing the rope from the prison scaffold. It was still hanging around Matt's neck.

"It's a really long story," he said, pulled it off and tossed it away.

"Sure. You must be wondering why I did that to Stu," Daryl said.

"No, not really."

The avenger removed her gaze from the ferris wheel and stared back at the man on the other side of the fence. "What do you mean, "not really"?"

"I've kinda figured it out, I think."

Daryl took a few steps away and mumbled: "Jenny's still alive. But the things he did to her …" She brushed a thick layer of snowflakes off her shoulders and back, shivering. Then she turned around: "You must have done something, too, to end up here. I mean, this is Hell, right? It's only for sinners, like Stu, and … and me …"

"Yes, I murdered someone. My wife, Sophie. We got divorced, and she was going to get the custody, but she …"

"Stop. I don't want to hear it," Daryl said.

Matt understood. After all, they both had their own problems to deal with, and sharing their stories with each other wasn't going to get them out of this nightmare.

"It's sad how things suddenly change like that," Daryl muttered. "I was in the middle of another boring day in my boring life, then I heard what had happened to Jenny, and everything just changed."

"Life's weird," Matt said, quoting what Daryl had stated when they were wandering to the hospital. That was less than six hours ago, and yet it felt like a number of days had passed. But time didn't seem to matter much in this place.

"Well, I have to go now," Matt declared.

"What?"

"I've gotta go. I need to find a circus, Robbie's Circus."

"But why?"

"I don't know. I just have to be there right now. I can feel it."

"But you can't just leave me here!" Daryl kicked the fence, which was too high to climb over and impossible to squeeze through. "I'll go nuts if I have to spend one more minute alone in this place!"

"Sorry. Good luck," Matt said and started walking towards the entrance to Huey's Hullabaloo House.

"Goddammit, Matt, I don't think I can survive much longer around here … Please …"

Matt suddenly got an idea. He stopped, went back to the fence and reached into his backpack.

"This has been pretty useful to me. I'm sure you'll need it, too," he said, sticking the small red radio through one of the holes in the fence.

Daryl grabbed it and started fiddling with it, but she couldn't find any normal stations. "It's broken. What the fuck's useful about a broken radio?"

"When there's a monster nearby, it plays white noise."

Daryl's eyebrows rose.

"I don't know why or how, but that's what happens. Whenever that thing plays static, you need to be on your guard," Matt said.

"Okay. I believe you," Daryl said and tucked the radio into her pocket. "Well, you need to go find that circus, I guess … Good luck, Matt."

"Same to you," Matt replied.

They stared into each other's eyes for a few silent seconds, then wandered away from the fence. Both of them knew they would never meet again.

Matt pulled one of the doors open and stepped into the Hullabaloo House.

---


	19. Family

Chapter 19: Family

Matt staggered down the wide hallway, his dizziness constantly reaching new astonishing heights. The floor was moving, jerking violently from side to side and occasionally a little upwards, intent on making the visitor lose his balance sooner or later.

As if that wasn't enough, the lights were constantly flashing – one splitsecond everything was brightly lit, the next shrouded in darkness. It was like the disco from Hell.

Finally, Matt reached the end of the hallway and stumbled through an opening to his right. The next corridor was almost too narrow for him, with metallic disks in the floor spinning around at a hellish pace. If he stepped on one of them, the results would definitely _not _be very pleasant. There was a doorway in the left wall at the other end of the corridor.

"_Matt … She's hurting me … Mom's hurting me … Please come save me … Hurry …_"

It was Tommy's voice, coming from somewhere beyond that doorway. Matt almost fell for it, but he knew that wasn't the real Tommy. Instead of letting the town trick him into rushing onwards and stepping on one of the spinning disks, he walked slowly and carefully through the corridor, ignoring Tommy's whimper.

The lights continued to flash, on, off, on, off, even faster than his heartbeat. "_This is just a real fucking haven for epileptics._"

Matt burst into the next room and was surprised to find out that, while it seemed to be sloping down at a strange angle, it felt like he was walking upwards. "_Must be some stupid architectural trick._" Whatever one could call it, it was confusing as hell.

After the sloping room, he entered a labyrinth of narrow corridors. The walls were completely covered with huge, filthy mirrors.

As he ran around in the maze, he discovered that none of them reflected his current movements like ordinary mirrors would do. Instead, these mirrors showed him beating up Amanda and Tommy, yelling at them, kicking them around, throwing half-empty glass bottles at them …

He sprinted around, desperately searching for a way out, but only found more mirrors and dead ends. "Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit …"

Then he abruptly stopped when he noticed the mirror in the middle of the wall to his right. It was half as wide as the others and not covered by as much filth and dust.

And it only showed his own true reflection: a tired, panting man, not busy beating his kids, just trying to find a way out of Hell.

Matt raised the shotgun, swung it in a horizontal curve and hit the mirror repeatedly until it shattered. Broken glass fell back and slid through a black tube hidden behind the labyrinth wall.

Not hesitating at all, Matt jumped through the opening and slid down the tube. He landed on the grating of another outdoor area of the park and stood. Snowflakes once more fell on his shaking body.  

A large tent with yellow and red stripes loomed before him. The familiar rabbit's face laughed next to the words "**Robbie's Circus**" on the sign above the entrance, to the left of which Amamet was standing with the fiery sword driven through his head again.

As Matt stepped into the silent circus, he thought he heard the angel's voices to his left chant something like: "_Dne__ ti._"

It was surprisingly cool inside the tent. Five rows of red seats lined up in a sloping circle surrounded the ring in the middle. A few rabbit costumes were sitting in the lower rows. They stared down at the ring, patiently waiting for the show to begin. A vague fragrance of popcorn and candyfloss wafted around.

Sophie stood in the middle of the ring, the night wind gently playing with her hair. A spotlight illuminated her body as blood trickled down from her bullet wound and coloured the sawdust red.

"Why did you do it, Matt? Why did you kill me?" she asked. "You thought it was the right thing to do, you thought you were protecting Amanda and Tommy?" This was the first time he had heard her voice since entering the town.

Matt walked down past the rows of dusty chairs, clutching the gun. Only two shots were left in it.

"_Truth may seem, but cannot be. Beauty brag, but 't is not she. Truth and beauty buried be,_" Sophie whispered. "To take the life of another human being is always wrong, Matt. No one deserves this." She lifted her right hand and pointed to the wound. "It's just wrong."

Matt reached the lowest row of seats, climbed over the short barrier and entered the ring.  

"We could have been such a happy family," Sophie said. "Isn't that right, kids?"

Two more spotlights were suddenly turned on to reveal Amanda and Tommy standing at the edge of the ring on either side of Sophie. They simultaneously ran to the middle and hugged her.

"Yes, mom. We could have been such a happy family," they both confirmed. Sophie smiled, ruffled their hair and then let her hands rest on their heads.

"You … you're not Sophie," Matt said. "And he's not Tommy, and she's not Amanda. The real Sophie's dead, Tommy and Amanda are in L.A. You're all just …"

The gross skin soon emerged from the children's scalps and began to wrap up the three bodies, unifying them into one big bizarre shape. It slid easily up Sophie's arms, down Amanda's smiling face, across Tommy's chest …

"You're just like the rest of them! The Stewardesses, the Cerberus, Weepers, Doctors, Nurses … You're monsters, too! You just looked different …"

Sirens wailed and a rusty fence suddenly appeared along the edge of the ring, trapping Matt with the unholy trinity. If he still had his radio, it'd be crackling like hell.

The three bodies rose from the sawdust as the skin slid down to Amanda's feet, across Sophie's head and around Tommy's toes. They were now completely wrapped up – the only parts that weren't covered by the filthy skin were their smiling mouths and Sophie's bullet wound. Long, razor-sharp claws emerged from the children's toes.

The Family floating before Matt let out a wrathful roar, lifted its left arm, which consisted of Sophie's left arm and Tommy's body, and swung it at Matt. He drew back just before the claws reached his stomach and fired his shotgun twice. The bullets plunged into their grotesque target and the Family quickly flew backwards, uttering a distorted joyful laughter.

Matt tried firing again, but he had run out of ammunition. He threw the weapon at the Family, which merely lifted its right arm (consisting of Sophie's right arm and Amanda), held the claws out horizontally and severed the gun while it was sailing through the air. The two pieces of the shotgun fell down to rest in the sawdust as the Family floated towards Matt and swung both of its arms back, timing the next attack.

Matt jumped sideways a splitsecond before the arms swung forwards. The Family's laughter echoed throughout the circus as it turned to once more face Matt, who had scrambled to his feet and produced the revolver.

The Family floated slowly towards Matt while he drew back, dodging the attacks, and pulled the trigger again and again. The shots didn't seem to do any damage to the creature, which continued swinging its arms at him, unabated, relentless, laughing like kids watching the circus clown. 

After firing the revolver eight times, the only result of his frantic trigger-squeezing was a quiet click. He reached into his pocket to find the five spare bullets, but was interrupted by the Family's left arm thumping into him, hurling his body through the stale air until he landed painfully in the sawdust.

Matt immediately rolled around and, lying on his back, pulled out the bullets and reloaded the revolver. The Family floated up to him and lifted both of its arms to deliver the fatal blow. Matt took aim as swiftly as possible and fired furiously at the deranged being. It retreated about six feet and its arms swung down into nothingness.

Now he was out of revolver bullets, too. "Shit," he mumbled, dropped the gun and scrambled to his feet again. He got the table leg out from his backpack and started thrashing the monster, but it soon cut the weapon into three useless pieces with the Cerberus-like claws protruding from Tommy's foot.

The only weapon he had left now was the steel meat tenderiser from the prison kitchen. He pulled it out and continued beating the Family, but this time he decided to go for Sophie's head.

He was too close - the arms were giving him bruises, the claws creating gashes in his legs and arms. But he ignored the pain; after all, he wasn't really here, right? An intense desire for destroying the creature and ending all this filled his mind and body as he hammered at her stupid smile, crushed the teeth, broke her nose and smashed those green eyes hidden behind the brownish skin.

The Family's joyful laughter turned into quiet, pitiful sobbing. Its feet finally returned to the floor. It landed in the sawdust in a confusing heap of skin, torsos, limbs and blood. It was lying completely still, but Matt still landed a few more blows before he dropped the crimson meat tenderiser and silence filled the circus once more.

---


	20. The End of the Journey

Chapter 20: The End of the Journey

The claws retracted and the filthy skin started to slide away. It seemed to withdraw back into the children's scalps, disappearing as gracefully as it had emerged at the library, in room C4 and in this tent a few minutes ago.

Slowly, relentlessly, the mangled corpses of Sophie, Tommy and Amanda were revealed. Their pale faces were frozen in miserable screams of pain and unanswered pleas. Blood was still flowing from their mouths, nostrils and bullet wounds. Where their skin wasn't covered by the dark red blood, the bruises left by table leg and meat tenderiser gave it a bluish colour. Sophie's petrified face was especially unbearable to look at.

Matt turned around and took a few steps away from the gory heap of his embodied memories. The huge pink rabbit costumes sitting in the chairs on the other side of the metal fence contemplated him intently. He definitely wouldn't be too surprised if they started applauding, now that tonight's big show was over.

"Well, what happens next?" he muttered. "What, oh mighty Gods or Silent Spirits or _what-fucking-ever_ you're called? Got any more ugly creatures for me to fight? Any more weird areas for me to explore? Any more stupid puzzles to solve?"

The rabbits just smiled and stared at him.

No, not _at_ him. It felt like they were looking _into_ him, into his mind …

"_What am I thinking? They're just big costumes. And it's not like there's anyone inside. At least not anyone _living, _I guess_ …"

Amamet's hand suddenly caught Matt's scalp and spun the man around 180 degrees so they faced each other. Then, both of the gloved hands rested on Matt's shoulders and the angel thrust his grotesque head forwards, thus driving the sword protruding from it through the normal head of the sinner.

Matt didn't have time to fight back and escape from the vice-like grip. He screamed as the hot blade and flames pierced the skin of his forehead, continued through his frontal bone and into his brain. Blood and tears blurred his vision, then everything went black.

---

_Truth may seem, but cannot be;_

_Beauty brag, but 't is not she;_

"Here's your peanuts, sir. Enjoy."

_Truth and beauty buried be._

Matt opened his eyes.

He was sitting in the plane. The middle-aged bald guy sitting next to him had just bought a bag of peanuts and was now pouring them down his throat. Stewardesses (with no more than two arms) wandered around the plane and sold such snacks to the passengers (who were all alive and kicking).

"_So it _was _just a bad dream. Whew … that's got to be the craziest dream I've ever had._" 

He looked out the window. The plane was about to land in South Ashfield's airport. Two long lines of tiny yellow lights indicated the runway.

A police car was parked down there, two cops standing outside, waiting. As the wheels reached the ground and the plane started gliding down the runway, Matt realized that his dream had told him one true fact: He _had_ killed Sophie back in L.A.

The passengers gasped and screamed when they saw the cops hurry into the plane. The bald guy to Matt's right dropped the small plastic bag, peanuts were scattered on the floor.

Matt felt the cold handcuffs tighten around his wrists. Feeling exhausted and dizzy, he only caught a few words of what one of the men droned: "… for the murder of Sophie Hardt … anything you say can … you have the right to …"

He was soon sitting in the back seat of the car as they drove away to the police station. The cops on the front seat were talking about the murderer they had just arrested.

"That guy killed his own wife. And I even heard they had two little kids!"

"Jeez, what a bastard."

Matt just stared silently out at the shops and apartment buildings of the city. Stars were clearly visible on the sky. A few butterflies fluttered around the traffic lights.

---

A/N: Try listening to "Tears of …" from the SH1 soundtrack while reading the next chapter. It just really fits.


	21. Epitaph

Chapter 21: Epitaph

_Silent Hill's __South __Cemetery__, 4 years later, January 5th_

White snowflakes fell from the afternoon sky with a background of grey fog twirling slowly around. About thirty gravestones protruded from the thin carpet of snow concealing the grass. A small church loomed in front of the yard, crows seated on the roof. The cold wind blew the reeds at the gurgling river back and forth.

One of the gravestones closest to the shore had the shortest, but most carefully carved epitaph of them all: "**You will live on forever in our hearts**".

A name was inscribed at the top: "**Sophie Hardt**".

The gate opposite the river uttered a shrill clamour for oil as it was pushed open by a 14 years young girl with black hair. She stepped into the cemetary and was followed by her two years younger brother, a kid with black hair, black trousers and a warm jacket over his Bart Simpson t-shirt. He was holding a bouquet of roses and tulips.

They walked across the cemetary and stopped at Sophie's tomb. Like so many other tourists, she had fallen in love with the quiet town during her vacations here several years ago. When she passed away, this had seemed like the right place to let her rest in peace.

Tommy gingerly placed the flowers in front of the gravestone and stood. For a while, he and Amanda stared at the river. Their foster-parents were waiting up at the observation deck – they thought it would be best for the kids if they let them visit their real mother's grave alone. After all, Amanda and Tommy were old enough to look after themselves.

Amanda broke the silence: "Do you ever wonder why she … Hey look, who's that?"

She had noticed a mist-shrouded figure staggering across the cemetary towards the gate she had just opened. It looked like the person was very exhausted or injured.

They hurried off to meet the figure, which turned out to be a 23 years old woman with red hair, a tired face and a small gun clutched in her hands. Her black sweater and blue jeans were torn and blood-spattered. Her countless bruises and sloppily bandaged wounds also revealed that she had recently gotten into a fight with someone, no, some_thing_ much stronger than her.

She looked like an angel, but definitely a fallen one at the moment.

"Uh, are you okay?" Tommy asked.

The woman looked at the kid's face. "Your eyes … You remind of that guy," she replied.

"The guy who did this to you?" Amanda blurted out.

The woman laughed and looked down at her wounded body. "No, this wasn't done by some guy. It's a long story … Anyway, I'm Daryl Thurman," she said and held out her hand.

"I'm Amanda Hardt," the girl said and shook hands with the surprised stranger.

"Hardt? So, you must be Matt's …" Daryl's eyes widened. "What a coincidence!"

"Err … Do you know our dad?" Tommy asked.

"Yeah, I, uh, I met him back in the town some years ago," Daryl said. "Do you know where he is now?"

Undying memories cast shadows over the faces of the kids. Tommy replied tersely: "Yes … In wing C-4 of the Penobscot Hospital for the Criminally Insane."

"Oh … I'm sorry. Well, if you get to visit him sometime, show him this," Daryl said, pulled out a small red object and handed it to Tommy. "Tell him that I got out. Tell him I'm leaving town."

Tommy and Amanda were already busy examining the scarlet object. "It's just a radio," Amanda stated. They soon found a normal station, which was only slightly disrupted by white noise once in a while. A male reporter was speaking:

"_… continues to puzzle the guards at __Penobscot __Hospital__. I'm standing here with director Humbert Chilton. Dr. Chilton, can you tell us more about this fugitive and how he seems to have escaped?_"

The radio started emitting the director's hoarse voice:

"_Well, I wouldn't exactly say that Mr. Hardt "escaped". It's rather as if he disappeared into thin air. We simply cannot understand how he could possible have vanished from his cell last night, but nevertheless, that's what has happened._"

The reporter's voice returned: "_I've been informed that you found something strange on the floor of the cell. Could you elaborate on this?_"

Dr. Chilton replied: "_Yes, that would be the large red symbol he appears to have drawn with one of the crayons we supplied for his sketches. Mr. Hardt would draw a lot, usually pictures of odd creatures he claimed to have encountered in the real world. But back to the symbol: Very detailed, it actually fills the entire floor of the cell, and basically looks like a big triangle inside two circles …_"

Tommy turned it off and looked up from the radio, but Daryl had already walked away and disappeared in the fog.

---

---

---

Last A/N: That's it! The End. Fin. Hope you all liked the ending – I had a lot of other ideas, like letting Matt commit suicide (but I thought it wouldn't be fitting for his character, and besides, it would seem too SH2-ish) or letting him escape from the town with Daryl (but it wouldn't have the nice "waking up in the plane" twist). I think the ending I chose was the most fitting and SH-esque, tell me what you all think … Oh, and I won't try to explain what I believe happened when Matt drew the Metatron symbol – that one's for the reader's imagination. Anyway, here's a list of the 11 geek-ish references I managed to stuff into this story:

1. Matt Hardt: A combination of the names of two SH3 voice actors, Matt Lagan and Lenne Hardt.

2. "Phantoms" by Dean Koontz is mentioned a few times in this story. It's a fairly creepy, SH-ish book, check it out if you need some real horror …

3. Stu Matheson: Stu is a character in Phantoms. Mike Matheson is another SH3 voice actor.

4. Carpenter Library – John Carpenter. Nuff said.

5. Daryl Thurman: Daryl Hannah and Uma Thurman are actresses in the Kill Bill movies, which are about revenge. And we all know why Daryl went to Silent Hill by now …

6. Cerberus: Famous hellhound from ancient mythology.

7. "Truth may seem, but cannot be; Beauty brag, but 't is not she; Truth and beauty buried be" is from a poem called "The Phoenix and the Turtle" by Shakespeare.

8. The paintings from the sin and virtue puzzles are basically ripped off from old Western art (as Wrath pointed out).

9. Amamet: a nasty creature from Egyptian mythology. In the afterlife, it eats the souls of the sinners …

10. Stepford Day Care Center: The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin is one of the creepiest books I have ever read. Haven't seen the new movie yet, though.

11. Dr. Chilton, the hospital director: Anyone who has seen/read Silence of the Lambs recently should be smacking hands to foreheads right now.

The rest of the names are just random words that jumped into my mind when Matt encountered the characters for the first time. By the way, remember that door in the day care center with "**The Only Door that lEAds To Holy redemption**" written on it? Try putting all those capital letters together.

Thanks to Jack Tresidder for writing "Symbols and their meanings", which I really ripped off for the painting puzzles and the part where Matt read about swords' symbolism. Thanks to Akira Yamoka for the Silent Hill soundtracks and Massive Attack for 100th Window, I listened to these CD's a lot while writing Family. Thanks to Konami for creating the wonderful world of Silent Hill and to this awesome fanfic-site (for the obvious reasons). Finally, thanks to my reviewers for your advice and encouragement. Thank you all so very, very much for reading this. It's my first fic around here and probably won't be my last, so tune in again when I have come up with another story … –E.P.O.


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